UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO EUmiCA^HONi
IN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
NUMBER NIN
WILLIAM BARNES
LINGUIST
Willis D. Jacobs
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS
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THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
IN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
NUMBER NINE
WILLIAM BARNES
LINGUIST
Willis D. Jacobs
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS
ALBUQUERQUE I 1952
PUBLICATIONS SERIES
This series in Language and Literature is in-
tended to present materials from the whole
field of language and literature, with particular
emphasis on those relating to the Southwest. Other
series established are Anthropology, Biology, Ed-
ucation, Engineering, Geology, History, Meteor-
itics, and Social Sciences and Philosophy; still
others are contemplated. Previous Publications
Series in the Humanities and Miscellaneous fields
have been replaced by the series in Language and
Literature and in Social Sciences and Philosophy.
All will be numbered only serially, beginning with
Number One. The UNIVERSITY OF NEW
MEXICO PUBLICATIONS take the place of
former numerous series in the University of New
Mexico Bulletin, except the Catalog series which
continues in the Bulletin.
See back cover for UNIVERSITY OF NEW
MEXICO PUBLICATIONS and Bulletins in
Language and Literature.
The price of this item is $1.00.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
IN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
NUMBER NINE
WILLIAM BARNES
LINGUIST
Willis D. Jacobs
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS
ALBUQUERQUE : 1952
University of New Mexico Publications
John N. Durrie, General Editor
Barry Stevens, Associate Editor
Publications in Language and Literature
Donald A. McKenzie, Editor
Copyright, 1952
by
The University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
Page
Introduction 5
I. The Man 9
II. The Books 13
III. The Culmination 54
IV. The OED 62
V. The Over-All View 75
Notes 83
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2011 with funding from
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http://www.archive.org/details/williambarneslinOOjaco
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST
INTRODUCTION
William Barnes (i 801-1886) did not lack fame. From
1844, when his Poems in the Dorset Dialect appeared, he
has had his admirers. Today his verse, most of it written in
the dialect of his native Dorsetshire, is still much loved and
anthologized. Typical of the praise he received as a poet dur-
ing his lifetime and after is this tribute by Llewelyn Powys :
No poet in all English literature has done more to reveal the quality
of homely village days as they follow, one after the other, against their
background of the fugitive, recurring seasons. These bucolic poems, so
innocent and so sturdy, instruct us how to become accessible to the won-
der latent in every mode of natural existence, teach us to be grateful for
the privilege of life on its simplest terms, with firm purpose and serene
minds, to face our inevitable lot of sorrow and death.1
Barnes has been called, quite simply, England's best ecloguist.2
The Encyclopaedia Britannica uses a quiet hyperbole :
His poetry is essentially English in character; no other writer has
given quite so simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour
of rural England. His work is full of humour, and its rusticity is allied
to a literary sense and to high technical finish.3
Because of such merit and such praise it is true that, as one
critic has put it, "It is for his dialect poems almost exclusively
that William Barnes is remembered today."4
In a way this fame has done Barnes a disservice. It has
meant the general neglect of his consuming interest and of the
largest part of his work. Throughout his long life, as his friend
Edmund Gosse says, Barnes' mind ran chiefly on philology.5
Thomas Hardy, another close friend, records that ueven on his
death bed his zest for the subject of speech-form was strong
as ever."6 Poetry was Barnes' love; but philology was his pas-
sion. "Less casually, he was a philologist of great originality
and reputation," John Drinkwater wrote, "with a knowledge
of many languages, and all through his life he was engaged in
1 Documentation will be found in the final section.
6 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
philological research that resulted in a long and important
series of publications."7 The acclaim of his poetry has over-
shadowed his linguistic achievement.
Barnes wrote more than ninety-five books and articles. The
greater part are concerned with linguistics. In the advancement
of this interest he learned to a degree some sixty languages,
from Hindustani, Persian, and Russian, to early Saxon, Welsh,
and Hebrew. Little investigation has heretofore been given to
his important philological interests and contribution. Barnes
has made a definite linguistic contribution. To theory he added
practice. It is worth study.
To practice what he preaches is always a little hard for
mortal man. Yet he does preach and, on occasion, seeks to
practice. So it has been with that flickering yet continuing group
of scholars, of whom Barnes was one, men such as the Danish
Jespersen, Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham, who are re-
solved that English as a Teutonic language could have re-
mained free of latinism and who have suggested that English
justifies itself only as it grows and increases out of its own
native Anglo-Saxon stock. The preaching has varied from the
phlegmatic to the fanatic, but its arguments have been fairly
constant. What has not remained constant with these scholars
is the practical endeavor to revive or create purely Teutonic
words when new cultures and new systems have demanded an
increased vocabulary. If, after all, a valid and satisfying Anglo-
Saxon word is not suggested when such a word is needed, then
the theories of linguistic "purity" will by right vanish under
the urgent adoption of the word from another language,
Greek, Latin, Spanish, or what not.
This has been the case. Inventions and discoveries have
asked for names; names like "velocipede" and "photograph"
have been given them. Human actions have called for new
ascriptions; "acoustics" becomes a science and "apophthegms"
are established. In this way among others English has added
to its language outside its basic Teutonic stock.
Barnes was convinced that what he called "Englandish" —
the language which he considered had ignored its origins as a
Teutonic speech — was destroying real English, and with that,
powers, beauties, values, and a modern reinvigoration of Ian-
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 7
guage by use of the Anglo-Saxon word stock. Simultaneously
it was creating a chasm of snobbery and humiliation between
the learned and unlearned.
Unlike the majority of his predecessors, however, Barnes
set out to prove the practicality of native English. First of all
he wrote his Dorset poems in that stock; but second, and far
more important to our purpose, he wrote two types of books
generally in the English of his heart:
i. Grammatical works. Here he attempted, in one or
another of the books, to prove both his knowledge of world
languages and the ability of Anglo-Saxon English to ex-
press all necessary meanings with dexterity and precision.
2. General works, like a book on logic ("redecraft"),
to illustrate how a purified English might clarify subjects
now complicated by "Englandish."
In these works Barnes has supplied hundreds of words taken
from the original English deposit which he offers as replace-
ments for the usual terms. His neologisms, it will be seen, vary
from the sober to the amusing. All, however, are instructive.
Something represented here grows increasingly important.
In this century of growing nationalism languages too have been
called upon for patriotism: Germany, for example, has long
tried for a completely "pure language," 8 and Iceland some time
ago rather well succeeded.9 The great questions that a study
of William Barnes and his role in the Anglo-Saxon tradition
involves are these : How valid is English as a language when
forced back to its native bed-rock; how profitable is it to revive
or create Anglo-Saxon terms; how valuable or injurious has
been the historical tendency of the English vocabulary; is there
an Anglo-Saxon revival of any moment; and are there means
of word-creation and actual words themselves in the writings
of Barnes by which English might well profit?
Chapter I
THE MAN
Five volumes of poems by William Barnes (1801-1886)
have attracted the bulk of the critical attention devoted to him.
Of his over ninety other books and articles the greatest num-
ber deal with linguistic matters. These philological studies
have never been adequately surveyed. Yet Barnes' major lin-
guistic works — utterly apart from his Dorset poems — are of
real value to all students of literature and language on at least
six counts :
1. They contain a body of general language theory and
scholarship, sometimes conventional, sometimes heterodox, but
always stimulating and suggestive, which places Barnes in the
forefront of language theorists. While some of his general doc-
trine may be repudiated, it can never be altogether dismissed.
2. They enunciate a specific "Purist" doctrine of wider
scope than that of any of his predecessors. No other man has
challenged the hold of modern latinized English, and defended
a purified, Anglo-Saxon English, to the degree and practice of
William Barnes.
3. They present a possible solution to mongrelized English
and an alternate program of greater scale and with more me-
ticulous plan than any previous to Barnes.
4. They enumerate as part of their declared program of
purification hundreds of word revivals, conversions, and neo-
logisims based on Anglo-Saxon models and concepts. A goodly
number of these have already entered normal usage, without
proper credit to Barnes; many more are meritorious.
5. They are written in part or in whole with a "native"
English vocabulary, purged of foreign elements — whether
Latin, Greek, or French. Two of the volumes, textbooks of
grammar and logic, are composed essentially in English of
Anglo-Saxon derivation. Thus they constitute a major rebellion
against standard latinized English, they represent historical
landmarks in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and they offer in them-
selves rare exemplars of theory put to the test of practice.
10 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
6. They comprise the most considerable corpus of argu-
ment in English opposed to the foreign element in modern
English.
Whether in the sixteenth century with "Purists" like Sir
John Cheke, Roger Ascham, and Thomas Wilson, or today,
few questions generate so much heat as this matter concerning
the proper complexion of English. Everyone talks; and there-
fore, it seems, everyone has his dogma of language. As Carlyle
is reputed to have published a doctrine of silence in forty vol-
umes, many men have stated their doctrine of one proper
speech with forty different results. There are those who mourn
the death of "fine old" Saxon words; those who attack alien
terms as the enemy of what remains; those who apotheosize
the country speech of native sort; those who demand the teu-
tonizing of the national tongue; but there is also the strong
and numberless clan which utilizes all the latinic iridescence
at its command to praise the foreign element in English and
to rejoice that the language had such osmotic good fortune.
Typical of the first group is Thomas Hardy. In his intro-
duction to some poems of William Barnes, Hardy sadly viewed
the modern history of native words. He regretted their loss :
Since his death, education in the west of England, as elsewhere, has
gone on with its silent and inevitable effacements, reducing the speech
of this country to uniformity, and obliterating every year a fine old local
word. The process is always the same : the word is ridiculed by the newly
taught ; it gets into disgrace ; it is heard in holes and corners only ; it dies,
and, worst of all, it leaves no synonym.1
The most brilliant defense and deification of latinic English
comes properly from those writers most prone to it. Typical of
this group was Logan Pearsall Smith; he apostrophized
English :
That exquisite amalgam and shimmering mosaic of Anglo-Saxon,
Danish, Greek and Latin, Dutch and French words and idioms which
make our language — the speech of Shakespeare — the most composite,
varied, eloquent, and in many ways the most beautiful form of human
utterance. . . .2
With Barnes, the question of suitable language, however,
was not only an academic matter but a subject of immediate
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 11
practical concern. A brief examination of Barnes' career will
serve to explain the linguistic works which had their basic origin
in that career. The way he earned his living was all-important.
It forced and shaped his thoughts about language; it particu-
larly centered his interest upon vocabulary. In profession he
was first a country school teacher and later a country clergy-
man. These occupations, founded and dependent upon lan-
guage, led Barnes irresistibly to the study of speech. Language
to men in these professions is an immediate and constant prob-
lem. The necessity to be understood is omnipresent. To choose
the right vocabulary, Barnes felt, was a concern branching far
from mere personal preference. He wrote of this often:
What we want for the pulpit, as well as for the book and the plat-
form, for the people, is a pure, homely, strong Saxon-English of English
stems, such as would be understood by common English minds and touch
English hearts. . . . We should not reach the English mind or heart
the more readily by turning "He scattered his foes" into "He dissipated
his inimical forces," nor by making "I have no proud looks" into "I
exhibit no superciliousness." Nor would an officer gain much good by
crying, "Dextral rotation" for "Right wheel."3
Hard experience, then, was Barnes' own teacher about this
requirement of intelligibility. He came to it gradually, from
mature reflection and honest realization — and at the sacrifice
of whatever superiority a man feels in deft use of sesquipedals.
His simple lesson was that "the large share of Latin and Greek
words in English makes it so much less handy than a purer
English would be for the teaching of the poor by sermons and
books."4 In later life he said, "There are tokens that, ere long,
the English youth will want an outline of the Greek and Latin
tongues ere he can well understand his own speech."5
But there was another drive behind Barnes. Barnes saw the
possibility of a dread social cleavage between the educated and
the unschooled, based on the difference in their vocabularies.
His basic democracy was appalled by this prospect; it rein-
forced his thought. Judging a latinized speech a hindrance to
education and a social evil, he decided to alter what he could.
His energy led him very far — into matters of basic linguistic
structure and philosophy. It made him a linguistic revolution-
12 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
ary. In his own person, he resolved to rid himself at least of
all arcane Latin and Greek adjuncts of English. In his church,
his daughter tells us, he
. . . preached many a sermon, not in Dorset, as one of his critics has
said, but in that terse Anglo-Saxon which to strangers sounded so quaint,
but was quite plain to the simplest villagers.6
Moreover Barnes' knowledge of the speech of his native
Dorset exerted a powerful influence upon his linguistic think-
ing. Familiar with the local dialect from childhood, he pointed
out:
In searching the word-stores of the provincial speech-forms of Eng-
lish, we cannot but behold what a wealth of stems we have overlooked
at home, while we have drawn needful supplies of words from other
tongues; and how deficient is even English itself without the synonyms
which our land-folk are ready to give it, and how many old root and
stem forms of words are used by people who might be thought to have
corrupted later forms into them.7
What the Dorset dialect showed Barnes is this : the vocabu-
lary of English folk-speech is "purer" than that of standard
English — that is, its vocabulary is generally derived from its
own Anglo-Saxon word roots ; a pure language can be a speech
of beauty, dexterity, and ease;8 and therefore the standard
English vocabulary can be profitably criticised — it could espe-
cially profit by investigation of the stores of English folk
words. Dorset gave Barnes the material by which to judge the
polyglot English of our day; his life as teacher and preacher
gave him the motive to change it.
Chapter II
THE BOOKS
Seven of Barnes' books contain the essence of his philologi-
cal thought and performance. Examining them individually in
chronological order will lead to the crux and heart of his
doctrines. His first major work in this field shows him already
questioning the postulates of standard English, though his own
diction is still conventional. The book is Se Gefylsta.1
Se Gefylsta was intended as a textbook of Anglo-Saxon. As
that, it had a moderate longevity, a second edition being called
for in 1886, seventeen years after the first. Its very nature
forced Barnes to limit his philological reasoning, but it did
not curtail that reasoning altogether. Three aspects of Barnes'
thought appear in the book. First, in it he enunciates one seg-
ment of his basic purist theory, setting a definition of purism
for himself which he was to modify but never betray:
He believes, though possibly few but Teutonic scholars will be of
his mind, that Anglo-Saxon (English) has not been cultivated into a
better form, but has been corrupted for the worse, since King Alfred's
days . . . the praise of greater richness which some bestow on English
must be lessened by the truth that Anglo-Saxon, like German, had within
itself the elements of the utmost richness ; and that we have thrown away
many of its good words to take in their stead less intelligible ones from
the Latin and Greek. We have in modern English the words solstice,
equinox, disc (as of the sun), and Sagittarius; but we have not enriched
our language with them, since we have thrown away good Anglo-Saxon
words, sun-stede (sunsted), eaniht, trendel, and scytta, to make room for
them.2
As the foregoing quotation illustrates, second, Barnes him-
self had not achieved a notable Saxonism of style; indeed he
was not yet attempting one. In Se Gefylsta luxurious Latin
English predominates. Barnes writes: "There is a tendency in
all languages to an immutation of words by syncope, aphaere-
sis, and apocope. . . ."3; in his later works he provides ready
substitutions for such words and warns against the unintelligi-
bility he himself had not avoided in his earlier textbook. Amid
13
14 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
the Latin polysyllables of the book, however, he even now
sought on occasion for a Saxon substitute. Thus immediately
after using "syncope" he alludes to the "outgoing of vowels"
as in Anglo-Saxon wordes to modern English words. It is one
of his earliest practical attempts at substitution. Before he
finished his life's writing he was to take this policy far.
Indeed the very title of the book indicates the growing
dichotomy within Barnes. The Latin Delectus is balanced by
the Anglo-Saxon Se Gefylsta, which itself is defined by the
native The Helper. By 1878 he was to eschew a word like
Delectus altogether. Then he titles a comparable book An Out-
line of English Speech-Craft. Here in 1849 ne writes "Pref-
ace"; there it is "Fore-say." In Se Gefylsta he uses the word
"Glossary"; in a later work he replaces it with "Clues to Mat-
ters Handled." The word "Matters" is not of Anglo-Saxon
origin, but Barnes' development is manifest.
From the 1849 Glossary can be seen how Barnes gathered
increasing knowledge of the language, its history, and its innate
possibilities. He listed many Anglo-Saxon words from the
Chronicle and Alfred, with their corresponding modern trans-
lation. Here was direct evidence of words lost to the speech;
here was evidence too how native English once multiplied from
within itself. He listed the For- words; few had persisted to
his day:
For-don .... to undo, do away, ruin
For-heregian .... to over-run with an army, to plunder, to harry
off
For-habban .... to hold off, restrain, contain
For-seon .... to look off, disregard.4
As he wrote such words, and many others, he began to
doubt the value of their present replacements; he began further
to doubt the propriety and wisdom of the whole process and
policy that introduced them. He noted that caf meant "quick,
active," and that for cafscipe he was forced to provide "quick-
ness, activity." He did not object; but he was learning the
originals and becoming accustomed to them. They seemed fit
and capable words themselves. They were to be so familiar
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 15
to him that in time he wished to make them familiar to
everyone.
A third aspect is notable in this book. Foreshadowed now
was a theory that he was later to magnify in a volume called
Tiw, published in 1862. This maintained that from certain
basic stems almost all words had eventually evolved. The
words were legion, but their origin was limited and determin-
able. In Se Gefylsta the idea is fleeting; its elucidation came
later. The Glossary reports :
B*RG, to hide, protect
Burh (burg) ... a town, fortified town, fastness, castle.
Hence borough, a rabbits' burrow, and burg, in the
name of places.
F*D, this root means 'to feed,' or 'food,' thence Fed-an ... to feed.
Thence 'fat,' as if 'fed,' and 'father,' as if 'feeder.'
Foda . . . food
Foster (as if fodster, a feeder) . . .5
In such etymologizing before the birth of the Oxford English
Dictionary Barnes displayed a remarkable prescience and, as
well, often a hasty folk judgment. Just as his burrow and
foster are traceably correct, his fat and father are unproved
guesses.
Se Gefylsta, in which appear William Barnes' first larger
conclusions in linguistics, may then be epitomized as follows :
1. The book announces a basic purist doctrine.
A. It holds that Anglo-Saxon English is purer than
modern English. This is so for two reasons: (1)
Modern English has lost valuable inflections; (2)
it has surrendered useful words to less intelligible
imported forms.
B. It further notes that Anglo-Saxon has the ability to
increase spontaneously from within itself.
2. Barnes' own style is noticeably latinized at this time.
Witness his early use of Delectus, aphaeresis.
A. There is an almost unwitting effort for Saxonism,
nevertheless; outgoing as a noun.
B. Through the Glossary, Barnes saw two phenomena
vividly placed before his attention : ( 1 ) Words of
16 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and their proliferative
quality; (2) the loss of such words since Old Eng-
lish times.
3. The book prefigures a later theory, the idea of basic
word stems, developed in Tiw.
The purpose and audience of Se Gefylsta confined Barnes
generally to its subject. With his next major book in linguistics
his purview widened. The book is A Philological Grammar ,
published in 1854.6 Its intent is prodigious. Barnes was certain
that he had distinguished the fundamental premises of gram-
mar, whatever the language. In A Philological Grammar he
sought to expound and illustrate those universal characteristics,
by means of multifarious example and comparison. Both the
magnitude of his reading and the detail with which he prose-
cuted this endeavor are revealed in his startling introduction.
"The languages," he wrote, "from which I have drawn my
principles and forms are, — " and here follows a list of sixty-
five languages, from Latin to Kafir, and including Welsh,
Chippeway, Japanese, Damulican, Syriac, "Hawiiah, of
Hawauu or Owhyhee," and Bulgarian.7
To employ Barnes' own useful term, A Philological Gram-
mar is "markworthy" in his development in four ways. First of
all, he reaffirms his belief in purism while at the same time he
constricts its earlier meaning. "A language is called purer,"
he defined it now and henceforth, "inasmuch as more of its
words are formed from its own roots." 8 Previously he had
insisted upon case and inflection as a test; now vocabulary alone
is the key. While Barnes was to refer to other features, his
interest from here on was intelligibility of vocabulary and resur-
rection of the tremendous possibilities within native English
for development and multiplication :
While a thousand compound words formed from English single words
would bear, to English minds, their own meanings in their known ele-
ments, a thousand words borrowed from another tongue would need a
thousand learnings to be understood . . . and the large share of Latin
and Greek words in English makes it so much the less handy than a
purer English would be for the teaching of the poor by sermons and
books.9
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 17
In the second place, Barnes attacks directly the influence
of Latin and Greek upon the English language. His approach
is frontal and unequivocal:
What the Senor Astarlon says in his Apologia de la Lingua Bascon-
gada (Apology for the Basque Language) is true of English as well as
Spanish : 'A blind slavery to the Greek and Latin languages, and a readi-
ness to believe that every thing which imitates their idiom must be so
far regular, has misdirected or fettered our whole literature.'10
The viciousness of such foreign doctrine, he maintains,
arises from a triple consequence : English originally had a rich
ability for self-creation, now abeyant; it has since permitted
bastard speech formations because of the domination of
exoticisms, and it has for long especially slighted its useful
affixes. Speaking of authochthonous word formation Barnes
says:
The Teutonic languages, and some other tongues of the Indo-
Teutonic division, such as Greek and Persian, are markworthy for their
ready formation of an unlimited store of nouns and adjectives by compo-
sition of others. This composition is the pride of these languages, as it
is a power whereby they can form new words to endless length and with
wonderful ease, for the taking up of new objects and notions as they
arise to the mind. . . .1X
Meanwhile English borrows :
We believe this to do our language great harm, — to kill it in one
of its most growing limbs, to tie it where its free action is most needful,
to weaken it where alone it shows increasing strength ; and it is worthy
of belief, that men who might know the unbounded vigour which the
Teutonic and Greek and Persian languages hold, and the weakness and
unhandiness of the stirrer Latin, would be unwilling to slight, if not to
kill, so great an element of vigour and growth in their mother-tongue.12
To intensify his regret Barnes cites the tradition of Ice-
landic and Persian. Creating new words by compounding the
old as ardently as ever, Icelandic shows vagnslod, wheel-rut,
mjad-drecka, mead-bowl, fjand-mathr, foe-man; and Persian
did the same with gulzar, rosebud, jinistan, fairyland. English
too possesses this faculty; consider its persistent compounding
of nouns — cupbearer, penknife, zvatchman, and thus offers
abundant proof — but the faculty is timid and unesteemed.
18 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Instead of this natural evolution of words, Barnes saw, for-
eign models have encouraged both importations and a bastard
form:
English writers have lately shown a disposition to slight the forma-
tion of the noun . . . and to take in its stead the noun and a mongrel
adjective, in imitation of the Latin idiom, and write 'tid-al wave' for
tide-wave, and 'postal regulations' for post-office regulations:
Why not, Barnes inquires, the equally admirable usugar-al
tongs, bedal-stead, lapal-dog, mousal trap?"13
Moreover through this dominance many a proper Saxon
affix has sunk into inanition. Barnes particularizes -some as "a
very useful adjective of the Teutonic language, though in Eng-
lish it unluckily is much slighted." If German, he asks, can find
a Teutonic -bar, as in essbar, why should English import a
Latin -ible instead?
For a third reason, too, A Philological Grammar is note-
worthy. Before, Barnes had uttered a full call for the reversal
of the historic trend in English vocabulary. He now took it
further. More than urging a return to native roots, he speci-
fied definite, precise methods of achieving a native, burgeoning
speech. One is to generate new Saxon verbs, nouns, and adjec-
tives through existing cognates :
We may enrich and purify our speech by the inbringing of words of
forms already known and received. Of the verb-form we may take
'greaten,' to exaggerate; of the noun-form . . . we may take 'fore-
draught,' a programme; and on the adjective form . . . we may have
'bendsome,' for flexible.14
He commends the newspaper use of "undersea" for submarine,
and he tabulates exact procedures for additional native terms :
The combination of a Saxon adverb and noun : forethought, oversight,
downsitting, uprising.
The addition of the suffix ness: thickness, thinness, softness.
The adoption of moribund Saxon suffixes: "Sunder would make a
good substitute for the Latin dis/J
dissentio . . . sunderthink
dispono . . . sunderset.15
Among these examples, it will be seen, are a few neologisms,
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 19
such as downsitting and sunderset. The majority are standard
native words provided as models from the past for inventions
of the future. The fact is that Barnes was now edging into a
full-grown Saxonism of style, not complete at all, but verging
toward it.
The style of A Philological Grammar, including the Saxon-
ism it portrays, is a fourth significant aspect of this volume.
Of that Mrs. Baxter reports :
The moment one opens the book one feels in a strange land ; even
our native English is given a new sound, for it is here that the Saxonising
of Barnes' English first becomes especially marked. For instance, vowels
are called ''breath-sounds," and consonants "clippings," because they clip
or cut off the open vowel sounds.16
There is no full effort, indeed no attempt, to Saxonize the
Grammar; nonetheless for the first time Barnes begins con-
sciously to substitute full lists of Saxon synonyms for Latin
English terms. As part of "Orthography," the classic term, he
analyzes what he names "breathings" and "clippings." These
are, as Mrs. Baxter explained, vowels and consonants, so called
because their new name explains their nature. Side by side with
them, nonetheless, are analyses of the classic "patronymics,"
"ellipsis," and "paronomasia." The language, thus, is an indis-
criminate mixture of the two dictions. Barnes was moving to a
Saxon practice, but he had not arrived. His complete arrival
in this topic of grammar is signalled by An Outline of Speech-
Craft some years later.
Other interesting substitutions further the process :
Hieroglyphics: sight-speech
Braille writing: finger-speech
audible speech : breath-sound language
printing: type language
pleonasm: an overfilling of speech
metonymy: a name-changing
euphemism : a fair-speaking.
In time Barnes offered variants for certain of these pseudo-
Saxonisms. Now he was feeling his way. The logic of his
changes here is simple : direct translation into native counter-
parts. Metonymy is literally a name-changing. Barnes devel-
20 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
oped beyond this obvious transliteration; he was to create
entirely new words on the pattern of the past. He was also to
resuscitate abandoned Old English words. That time was not
yet.
A summary of the nature and value of A Philological
Grammar gives evidence that this book contains five qualities
of linguistic significance:
i. It seeks to establish basic grammatical principles true to all lan-
guages.
2. It reinforces Barnes' previous conviction that purity in language
is desirable.
A. Purity to Barnes now means essentially that a speech's vo-
cabulary is formed from its native roots. Other aspects are
incidental.
B. Purity is valuable because it makes language both more regu-
lar and, particularly, more intelligible to its populace.
3. It insists that Latin and Greek have misdirected and perverted the
native genius of English.
A. English formerly owned a gift of fertile self-development.
B. English has adopted bastard forms of speech because of false
models: postal for post.
C. English has especially slighted desirable and useful affixes:
-some.
4. It affirms that English can still redirect its future.
A. Means for self-creation within the vocabulary are easy and
numerous.
B. Lists are supplied of ways by which expansion may occur from
existing forms: sheriffdom.
5. It presents the first precise evidence of the Saxonising of Barnes'
own prose.
A. It suggests Anglo-Saxon variants for latinized English: name-
changing for metonymy.
B. It foreshadows a new grammatical vocabulary, fully estab-
lished in the later Outline of Speech-Craft.
Tiw, published in 1862, is a hobby-horse.17 It is dedicated
to the proposition that words derive from a limited number of
original stems. What was a passing reference in the Glossary
of Se Gefylsta is here exalted to a dogma which was Barnes'
special pet (as contrasted to purism, whose seriousness evoked
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 21
not affection but earnestness) and, to some, his special achieve-
ment in linguistics. He states the doctrine plainly:
My view of the English, as a Teutonic tongue, is, that the bulk of
it was formed from about fifty primary roots, of such endings and be-
ginnings as the sundry clippings that are still in use by the English organs
of speech. I have reached these roots through the English provincial
dialects and other Teutonic speech-forms, and I deem them the primary
ones, inasmuch as, by the known course of Teutonic word-building and
word-wear, our sundry forms of stem-words might have come from them,
but could not have yielded them.18
The root sounds then spread:
Each root in the fulness of the word-building, of which much is shown
in our Teutonic tongue, may yield more than 300 forms of root words
and stems without any compound words. . . . Then, again, some few
of the fifty primary roots may become other forms by change of initial
clipping, such as ch*ng, or )*ng, for k*ng, and thus the whole body of
more than fifty primary roots may yield 15,000 root forms and stems,
of one or two vowel sounds, from which, again, an almost endless supply
of words may be made by composition.19
Barnes had the assurance and bravado of certainty. "I
hold," he declared flatly, "that my primary roots are the roots
of all the Teutonic languages; and, if my view is the true one,
it must ultimately be taken up by the German and other Teu-
tonic grammarians, and applied to their languages."20
It may be assumed that Tiw was close to his heart; in it
he felt he had opened momentous horizons for all scholars.
Baxter tells his affection for this work:
The "hopeful brat," Tiw, was one of the author's pets among his
literary children, and for nearly all his life after its publication he fol-
lowed up his labours among roots and stems. His theory was that in
primitive times language was limited to a few fundamental sounds or
words, and that in the course of ages and different uses these roots ex-
panded into many distinctive forms, each class of which he calls a stem
. . . .21 William Barnes seems to have had the idea that the roots of all
tongues, if thoroughly investigated, would prove to be identical, for he
finds Latin and Greek words may equally be traced to these same funda-
mental sounds.22
22 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Barnes was not alone in his esteem for Tiw. It was then
shared by others. One critic wrote :
The book he has called Tiw appears to open up a secret but certain
page in the history of human civilization — the page which lays bare the
first mainsprings that guide the utterance of thought, and shape the phil-
osophy of language. Mr. Barnes has done in this department enough to
place his name by the side of those of Home Tooke and Max Muller,
and that is more than any other British philologist has achieved.23
It is still shared by others. Writing in the Dictionary of
National Biography, Thomas Seccombe declared that Tiw is
Barnes' "most considerable philological work, devoted to the
theory of the fundamental roots of the Teutonic speech." 24
To paraphrase, however, the notorious description of Brown-
ing's Sordello, Tiw might more properly be called a colossal
derelict on the sea of philology.
There is no doubt that the theory is piquant. Barnes pro-
vides forty-nine "roots"; they are:
L, M, N, R, W, D, T,
DrTr
Dw Tw
B*ng P*ng
p*
G
K
H*
Bl*ng PI*
Fl*
Gl, Gn
Kl,
Kn Kw*
Br*ng Pr*
Fr
Gr
Kr
Wr
Th*ng
S*ng
Sn*ng
Thr*ng
Sp*ng
Sw*ng
Thw*ng
Spl*ng
Spr*ng
Sc*ng
Scl*ng
Sct*ng
Sl*ng
Sm*ng
Squ*ng
Str*ng
From these arise multitudinous mutations :
The ending — ng may become — nk, as cr*ng, to bend, gives crank
. . . — ng may become — nge, as cr*ng, to bend, given cringe ... or
it may become — nch, as fl*ng, flinch . . . or g, as d*ng, dig ... or it
may become dge, as pl*ng, pledge ... or it may become k, as cr*ng,
crock ... or tch, as p*ng, pitch (as dike of the North is ditch in the
West) ... or it may be lost, as tr*ng, try.26
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 23
To glance at Barnes' method, the sober detailing of which
comprises the bulk of this volume, is interesting. Take, for
example, he says, the basic root G*NG. Its meanings and
extensions are logical and obvious :
G*NG
i.
To go, stir, act, as
To go round or spin,
To go to and fro ; shake ;
To go, as a mchine.
2.
To give room for going, or stirring, as a gap.
3-
To be of go-some form, as a globular for rolling, or pointed for going
through a body.
4-
To make a sound the type of which was that of a going body.
— NG
Gang, to go
Gang, men that go together
Gangweek, n. a boundary-beating week, Rogation week
Jingle, n. to stir, shake
Jingle, to make the sound of shaking bodies
JINK n.
— NK
JINK, n. to dodge, turn a corner
JENK, n. to ramble, jaunt
— G
Gag, to stop the going of the mouth ?
Whirl-gig
Gig, a light-going vehicle
Giggle, to keep wagging or stirring . . .
Jug, the vessel that is to go round ? . . .
Goggle-eyes, round rolling eyes
— DGE
Gudgeon, s. w. the end axes on which a roller moves
— K
Jack. I hardly think that Jack, which is an element of many English
words, is a form of the name John. It seems to carry some
meaning of to go, to stir, or to act as a machine, or ineundi, as
applied to the make of some animals.
Jack, for roasting
24 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Jack, the pike (fish) . . .
— B
Gibe ...
Gab, (gift of the) . .
Gibberish . . .
Gape.27
That strong opposition to his theory would arise, Barnes ex-
pected. He hastened to exhibit his objectivity and reasonable-
ness :
It may seem to some again that, by a little thought and twisting of
root-meanings, one may show any word as a stem of a root of the same
initial letter. This, however, is not very widely true, as I find I cannot
make the root k*ng own the word carry, and I conclude it is a Welsh
word.28
To one with the Oxford English Dictionary before him,
such etymologizing would perhaps at once condemn Barnes,
for carry, rather than a Welsh word, is Norman French, orig-
inally carier. Indeed, many of Barnes' etymologies are mis-
taken. To attribute a common origin to the Scottish gang, Scan-
dinavian jingle, the obscure gibe, gig and goggle, the onomato-
poetic gibberish, and the Norse gape may be accurate; it may
also be false. But Barnes was figuring his etymology before the
OED could assist or check him, and the wonder may be how
often he is right and not how often wrong; moreover, to the
view of stems he advocated there is no positive verdict. The
dim origins of speech are often known; the dimmest are not.
As the full title of this book denotes, Barnes was most in-
terested in the place and value of English. He asserts that the
aim is "the showing of the formation of the English tongue,
and the purity of its dialect." 29 Thus he returns to the doc-
trine closest to his thoughts, purism in language :
From this insight into the upbuilding of English I perceive that the
provincial dialects are not jargons but true and good forms of Teutonic
speech, with words, which, if the speech has grown into full strength in
every stem, ought to be or to have been somewhere in the speech of Teu-
tonic tribes, and many of which are highly needful for the fulfilling the
wants of the book-speech.
It seems to me that through a knowledge of the stem-building of
English from its primary roots we should win a more accurate use of
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 25
English words; and more correct definitions of such words in our dic-
tionaries.30
Throughout Tiw Barnes utilizes dialect and Old English
terms; this attests his comprehensive knowledge of such
phrases, his recurring interest in them, and his belief in their
usefulness and regeneration both as illustrations and as normal
usage. "Many of which," he had said, "are highly needful
. . . ." Some of the cited phrases are:
Dialect.
Bee-bike, a bee's nest
butterwort, the plant
addersbot, the dragon-fly
bating with child, pregnant
pulky, stout, thick
barth, an enclosed yard
bligh, likeness
brent, brant, steep, lofty
paupin, to walk awkwardly
fingle, to take, entangle
feck, handlesomeness, activity
fleech, to frighten
nesh, bendsome, soft, yielding
wanluck, ill luck
wanrest, anxiety
wanchance, mischance
wanweard, wayward
O. E.
Briggan, to build
betan, to make up, full or big, as from a deficiency
nestan, to spin, twine
wonsted, a wonted place.31
From words like wanluck and wanrest he derived fresh in-
spiration. They seemed to him of such excellence that they
should not be confined merely to provincial speech. Listing
such words in the course of Tiw, to prove by them family group-
ings of terms, reminded him of the words. He never did for-
get them. Their time and their book, however, was not yet.
Unobtrusively, almost unnoticeably, Barnes' prose is here
predominantly Saxon. For various he consistently employs
26 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
sundry; for consonants, clippings; for construction, upbuild-
ing. There is no fanaticism in this policy; latinized words are
sufficiently present to make for ease. What is notable is the
simplicity and smoothness of the style, increasingly native as
it is. Barnes was comfortable in it; he was writing it without
crabbedness or strain. Except for a few words previously in-
troduced, like clippings, neologisms are not evident ; the words
are standard but native English. The tendency here was not to
introduce old words, but rather to eschew the Latin.
Tiw, a book on a theme, relates indirectly to the chief mo-
tive of Barnes' writing. That relation, though slight, had its
due place however in the full establishment which was to come.
In itself Tiw presents these consequences:
1. It postulates a firm theory of the basic relationship of
all words. Barnes maintained that the Teutonic lan-
guages, by mutation and extension, have devolved from
forty-nine word roots.
2. It purposed to illuminate English and ennoble its
dialects.
3. It recalled to Barnes' mind words both of dialect and
of Old English which he was later to find profitable.
He concluded that in provincial speech are words
"highly needful for the fulfilling the wants of the book-
speech."
4. It is written in a prose strongly Saxon, though with
rare neologisms; yet the style is without strain or
contortion.
In 1863, under the encouragement and with the financial
backing of the Philological Society, William Barnes published
A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect?2 F. J. Furni-
vall, who was secretary of the Society, put a condition on its
support. He required Barnes to emend the style:
Furnivall's Philological Society moved to print Barnes's "A Gram-
mar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect" if he would "substitute the
usual terms for the unusual ones — as voice (sounds), voicings (vowels),
clippings for consonants, mate-wording for synonyms, &c, there being no
reason to introduce such quaint and unhappy words — what notion does
clippings convey to one's mind? — especially as other usual terms — diph-
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 27
thongs, pronouns, &c, are retained and "vowels" is used more than
once." He agreed to the changes.33
Nonetheless there is a noticeable simplicity of style in the
Grammar and Glossary. Words like of wearing, foreelders, and,
in the main, a native vocabulary testify to a moderate Saxonism
in the prose. Forced by Furnivall to recoil, Barnes still em-
ployed in this volume a noteworthy native English. With it,
the prose is smooth and agreeable.
Thomas Hardy, himself a Dorset man, had remarked,
"The Dorset dialect being — or having been — a tongue, and
not a corruption. . . ,"34 and Barnes' purpose in this study was
to identify and defend the Dorset dialect as a language, not a
rustic distortion of standard English. In these latter days
scholars universally recognize, of course, folk dialects as inde-
pendent fellows of the accepted dialect of a nation, or standard
speech. Laymen are often less understanding; to many of them
Kentucky mountain speech is degenerate modern English. In
his Grammar and Glossary Barnes treated his Dorset dialect
with complete comprehension of its distinct and legitimate
origins. He explained:
The old speech of the land-folk of the south-west of England, seems
to have come down, with a variation hardly quicker than that of the usual
offwearing of speech-forms, from the language which our foreelders, the
followers of the Saxon leaders Cordic and Cynric, Porta, Stuf, and
Wihtgar, brought from the south of Denmark, their inland seat.35
Barnes first explained the special character of Dorset. He
then went further. The Dorset dialect, he said, could serve
as a warning, a guide, and an aid to standard English. It
warned against snobbery and unintelligibility, it showed a way
to avoid them, and it contained lessons and profit for the stand-
ard vocabulary. One such profit was the "useful adjectives" — -
or affixes — retained by dialect :
Our useful adjectives ending in some, German sam, as quarrelsome,
noisome, equivalent to the Latin ones in ax-loqu-ax , given to talking; or
bundus, — vaga-bundus, given to wandering, naming the state of a noun
likely or given to do an action, would have been well taken into the
national speech from any dialect in which they might be found, instead,
of those borrowed from the Latin ; as heedsome, attentive ; winsome,
28 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
likely to win or captivate; lovesome, disposed to love; blithesome, dis-
posed to be blithe; jadesome, laughsome, runsome (as mercury), melt-
some (as butter or lead). Winning and loving are bad substitutes for
winsome and lovesome, since winsome does not mean actually winning
one, but likely to win one; and lovesome is not amans, but amasius.SQ
-Some was not alone; Barnes adverts to his favorite for-:
It seems a pity that we should have lost the free use of the affix for
(off, or out) in such words as forgive, forswear. The Friesians, like the
Germans with ver, make good use of it. They have many such words as
forlitten, to forlet, neglect.37
Volume I of the New English Dictionary, now commonly
known as the Oxford English Dictionary, was issued in 1888.
Its chief precursor, W. W. Skeat's An Etymological Dictionary
of the English Language, was published in 1881. Stratmann's
A Middle-English Dictionary appeared in 1891. The indispen-
sable Anglo-Saxon Dictionary of Bosworth and Toller saw
publication in 1882. Writing a full generation before these
scholarly, definitive monuments, William Barnes was depend-
ent in great part upon his own investigations, his own judg-
ment, and his own ear. In his plea for additional words formed
from -some, he had chiefly his experience to follow in estimat-
ing what did not already exist. Naturally he erred on occasion.
Winsome was in the greater language; lovesome, blithesome
and laughsome have long been established. Barnes obviously
had not heard them; it is no wonder. At that time, the OED
shows, they lived, but only on the rubbed periphery of speech
and print. If he deserves no credit for them, thereby, he still
originated others here which may have equal value as words or
as pattern: heedsome, fadesome, runsome, and meltsome have
at least a modicum of logic to advance them, and the pattern
they provide may later be found helpful.
As he surveyed Dorset, Barnes was further struck by its
richness of vocabulary, exactness of phrase, and simplicity to
the understanding. It gave him pause :
In searching the word-stores of the provincial speech-forms of Eng-
lish, we cannot but behold what a wealth of stems we have overlooked
at home, while we have drawn needful supplies of words from other
tongues; and how deficient is even English itself without the synonyms
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 29
which our landfolk are ready to give it, and how many old root and
stem forms of words are used by people who might be thought to have
corrupted even later forms into them.38
Fond partiality was not deceiving Barnes. Authority has
been strongly on his side in this. Declared Joseph Wright, one
of the stout stalwarts of English scholarship: "... what an
immense wealth of words there is in our dialects. . . ." 39
Volume I of Wright's six volumes of dialect words, exclusive of
supplementary lexicons, contains 17,519 simple and compound
words. The homonymous Thomas Wright substantiates this
largesse. He stated:
We find in the provincial dialects not only considerable numbers of
old Anglo-Saxon . . . words . . . but also numerous words . . .
which, while they became obsolete in the English language generally,
have been preserved orally in particular districts. The number and charac-
ter of these words is very remarkable. . . .40
Out of Dorset, therefore, Barnes perceived that English
could gain. The words were native, they were plentiful, they
were known, they were understood. To go abroad for substi-
tutes was wasteful, and it was dangerous to the native stock.
He already was using "word-stock" for vocabulary and
"speech-form" for grammar; in addition he began to list dia-
lect words :
Becall. To call by bad names.
Biver. (A. S. bifian . . .) To bunch up, or shake, as with
cold or fear.
Nesh. (A. . . A.S. nesc. or knesc.) Tender, soft. 'This meat
is nesh.'
Not. (A. S. knot, shorn or clipped.) Without horns ; as 'a not-
cow' 'a not-sheep.'
Rathe. (A. S. hraeth.) Soon; early. Thence 'rathe-ripe,' the
name of an apple.
Readship. (A. S. raed-scipe, sense, reason.) A rule by which one
may act, or a truth to which one may trust.
'You've a-put the knives across: we shall quarrel.'
Ah, there idden much readship in that.'
Reremouse. (A. S. hroremus . . .) A bat.
Stop-gap. One called in from necessity to fill the place of a more
30 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
eligible but absent one. 'I ben't gwain to be a stop-gap
vor another.' 41
Joseph Wright's authoritative English Dialect Dictionary
acknowledges Barnes' correctness; along with others, Barnes'
use of nesh, becall, and other dialectal words is quoted. For
not, peculiarly, the Dictionary cites a use by Thomas Hardy
but does not include Barnes. The Oxford English Dictionary
is less generous.42 Rathe is accredited among others to Tenny-
son; Barnes' advocacy is ignored. Rede and read are tracked
through the centuries; the logical reads hip (or redes hip) is
ignored. It is given by Joseph Wright, though without refer-
ence to Barnes. Rearmouse, defined by Wright without men-
tion of Barnes, is ignored by the OED. Stop-gap appears in
the OED, cited from the year 1691 to 1827, and then again
from 1883 on; its interim revival by Barnes is ignored.
The Grammar and Glossary enters into the history of
Barnes' linguistic development and achievement for sound
reasons. It establishes that:
1. Dorset is a language, not a corruption of standard
English.
A. The book elucidates Dorset orthography and pho-
nology.
B. Through examples of Dorset prose, it singles out
nonessential qualities of standard latinized speech.
2. Dorset is valuable as an approach to standard English.
A. It reminds English of serviceable and profitable
affixes.
B. It recalls great stocks of native English words.
Early England and the Saxon-English is a milestone in the
history of the English language.43 In the midst of an account
of the Anglo-Saxon invasion and customs, William Barnes di-
gressed to utter a full declaration and a full program of purism
in language, with a carefully exemplified scheme for reinvigo-
rating, reviving, and coining words on Anglo-Saxon principles.
It is one of the most completely wrought statements of purism
in the language. The tone is approximated with the first word
of the book proper, a replacement of the wholly Latin uPref-
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 31
ace" with the semi-Latin "Fore-Note." Foresay, totally Eng-
lish, appears in succeeding volumes, wherein Barnes' practice
goes nearly all the way of his theory.
Despite the occasional employment of Latin English,
Barnes wrote Early England in a fairly consistent Saxon prose.
Why he permitted any Latinism at all is probably explained by
the original scope of the book. When he began it, he visualized
it only as a conventional history of early England; the lan-
guage partook of Latin because he was not wilfully avoiding
it. As a whole, nonetheless, the writing shows a Saxon texture,
for by this time Barnes through scholarship and by credo had
perfected a prose preeminently native.
From the chapter headings, with a few notes on the con-
tents, can be perceived both the medley of Latin and Saxon
English, and the initial purpose of the book.
CHAPTERS
SAXON-ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS (From Bede and Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle chiefly; Gildas, Aneurin, Taliesin, and other
Welsh narratives are cited.)
SAXON-ENGLISH FEUDS (Mainly a listing of tribal animosities
and engagements.)
SAXON-ENGLISH LAWS (Of historical interest only).
LANDHOLDING AND RANKS OF MEN (One section devoted
to BEER: "The Teutonic race might be rather clearly offmarked
from others as the beer-brewing race, since all tribes of them have
been fillers of the vat and emptiers of the beer-horn.")
HEATHENHOOD (Written in an allusive and pedantic manner;
moves from Horace, Homer, Virgil, Vedas, Ovid, Arnobius,
Herodotus, Eddas, Livy, Sanscrit, Welsh, to Anglo-Saxon in the
mention of local gods.)
CHRISTIANITY
THE DANES
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
BRITISH WORDS IN ENGLISH
THE FRIESIANS.44
Not until the section named the English Language did
32 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Barnes allow himself to issue his proclamation on purism.
Though prefigured in his earlier books and in earlier centuries
by others, that proclamation is revolutionary. Barnes not only
uttered it; he implemented it by accomplishment and by a lexi-
con, for the first time appearing in quantity in this volume. He
was, as George Sampson said, "fiercely sincere." Here he al-
lowed his convictions to speak.
This momentous manifesto of four short paragraphs con-
tains twelve issues in brief. It is multum in parvo. They are
not written in Barnes' neatest style. In his zealousness he neg-
lected prim order; the issues are enounced breathlessly, but
there is no doubt of their meaning:
English has become a more mongrel speech by the needless inbringing
of words from Latin, Greek, and French, instead of words which might
have been found in its old form, or in the speech of landfolk over all
England, or might have been formed from its own roots and stems, as
wanting words have been formed in German and other purer tongues.
Thence English has become so much harder to learn, that, in its
foreign-worded fulness, it is a speech only for the more learned, and
foreign to unschooled men, so that the sermon and the book are half lost
to their minds: whereas in Tuscany and in the west of Ireland, or in
Wales, the speech of the upper ranks is that of the cottage, and the well-
worded book of the higher mind needs no list of hard words to open its
meaning to the lower.
Some of the mongrel form of our English has arisen from the slight-
ing of Saxon-English, and other Teutonic tongues at our universities and
in our schools, where Latin and Greek have been, to barely Latin and
Greek scholars, the only source of wanted, or at least new, words.
From the use of foreign words, or it may be stumps of foreign words,
instead of English ones, there comes a need of two-fold learning. . . ,45
With the statement went analysis. English is historically
Teutonic, Barnes recalled. "Almost all the words of Saxon-
English are made from Teutonic roots or stems," he said, "and
this pure speech lasted with only the changes of common wear
till the incoming of the Normans in 1066." 46 Emphasizing the
precept of purity, he points out that even after the triumph of
the Normans, "the landfolk still spoke the purer Saxon-Eng-
lish." 47 To this day, as his Dorset life had taught him, Saxon
English persists: "Farming and handicrafts were still in Saxon-
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 33
English hands, and most of the words for things of those call-
ings were and now are plain English."48 Barnes believed in-
tensely what W. W. Skeat once but implied when the latter
noted, apropos an index, "Words marked (E.) are pure Eng-
lish, and form the true basis of the language."49
The arrival of French and Latin eroded this Saxon stock.
That Barnes had studied this history exactly he demonstrated
by further dissection. He illustrates the gradual dissolution :
In the Saxon, before the time of the Norman conquest,
A Judge was dama or deemer.
Judgment or Sentence, Dom — our doom.
Assizes, Sessions, Gemot or mot.
Franchise, Freoburh.
Parliament, Wittenagemot.
Prison, Quaerten.
Bail, Burh.50
It is apparent then, he felt, that French and companion
Latin words have rooted out native terms. Barnes did not see
necessity in that nor pride because of it:
It may be said that the words brought in from Latin, Greek or
French, were all needed for new things as they were brought under
speech, and that our tongue is richer by all of those words than it was in
the olden time. Not so, those who read the books in our earlier speech
find English words which have been offcast, and see that many foreign
words which have taken their places stand now only as a word intaken
for a word cast out. . . .
Then, again, the foreign words were not of great need, inasmuch as
words for things that came newly under speech, might have been taken
from the word-stores of our landfolk over the kingdom, or have been
made from our roots and stems.51
He saw no pride in it because one evil consequence of the
shift in vocabulary was a deliberate, manufactured unintelligi-
bility of speech. It was visible in church :
The Latin and Greek mingled-speech of the pulpit is often one
ground on which the poor leave their church, where the preaching is,
as they call it, too high for them.52
It was equally visible in school and street:
What we want for the pulpit, as well as for the book, and the plat-
34 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
form, for the people, is a pure, homely, strong Saxon-English of Eng-
lish stems, such as would be understood by common English minds and
touch English hearts. . . .
We should not reach the English mind or heart the more readily by
turning "He scattered his foes" into "He dissipated his inimical forces,"
nor by making "I have no proud looks" into "I exhibit no supercilious-
ness." Nor would an officer gain much good by crying "Dextral rotation"
for "right wheel."53
He saw no pride in it, furthermore, because the invading
and conquering vocabulary promoted superciliousness and
snobbery :
It may be thought that Latin and Greek-English is more refined and
lofty than pure-Saxon-English; but refinement and lofty-thoughtedness
must be in the thoughts, and it is idle to put words for wit.54
There is a snobbery not only of judgment but of diction too :
Luckily our tramways and railways were first made by working
men who used for things under hand, English words of their own, as
rail, railway, sleeper, ballast, tram, truck, trolly, shunt, and a sliding;
but, when the railway was taken into the hands of more learned men,
we had the permanent way for the full-settled way, and the terminus
instead of the rail-end, or way-end, or outending.55
The final result, he avers, has seen the ignominy and aban-
donment of the native speech. With Latin the aristocrat, Anglo-
Saxon English was orphaned:
. . . the Friesic speech will clear up the Saxon-English body of our
tongue, much of which, has been so long slighted that it has been at least,
mistreated from our misunderstanding of it . . . being . . . the same
speech, and in our own days, less foregone, than in our English, from
its old form.56
The years Barnes had devoted to Dorset now proved ne-
gotiable. From his study of that popular speech he had learned
its consanguinity with Old English. The Anglo-Saxon eale was
still the Dorset eale : the Anglo-Saxon beat-an was the Dorset
heat: the Anglo-Saxon maene was the Dorset meane.57 The
connection was close :
The English of Kent, in 1340, of Dan Michel, in his "Ayenbite of
inwit" ("Remorse of Conscience"), written in 1340, as brought out by
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 35
Mr. Morris for the Early English Text Society, is almost the old Eng-
lish of Dorset. . . .58
A direct key to the effect and effectiveness of the native
vocabulary in operation is provided by the Fore-Note of the
book. Whether by plan or by natural development, Barnes
wrote it mainly in the purged vocabulary he affirmed :
FORE-NOTE
There are books great and good, on the Saxon-English times,
whether by Turner of Kemble, or other writers, and yet, to readers
who may not be quite ready to furnish their book-shelves with works of
costly sizes ; or may not have time for long and deep reading, a hand-
book on the history of their forefathers may not be unwelcome.
The matter of my little work has been drawn from early and good
sources, and, however its views on some points may seem to be mistaken,
I believe that they are so far wellgrounded as to be worthy of thought
with others.
Brooding long over the Saxons led him not only to a
"purer" prose but also to an Old English warp. How imbued
he was by now with Saxon interests is demonstrated by the
very structure of sentences. "Pascen the son Cwrteyrn,"
Barnes narrated, "who had withdrawn to old Saxony, came
home."59 The syntax as well as the flavor is noticeably anti-
quarian. Unabashedly, perhaps unselfconsciously, he utilized
Saxon-like terms :
. . . they might have found that the unbyholdingness of the little
chiefdoms of the Britons was their weakness.60
The Friesic race must have been a worksome people even in the
Roman times. . . .61
. . . their land was water-bound, and offsundered from other peoples
on the land-side by marshes. . . ,62
Bendsen calls it a useful guide to the North Friesic speech-form,
though it holds only a share of its rich word-store. . . .63
. . . motemounds of many of our hundreds are in out-step
spots. . . t64
In Early England Barnes began to list his proposed native
substitutes for exotic terminologies in the English language.
This process was accelerated in his later books, but it is con-
scious, full-fledged, and intent here. The purpose was dual: to
36 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
reveal that Latin English had exiled sound and comprehendible
native words, and that it is possible to restore or create pleas-
ing and desirable Saxon expressions.
For the first, he tabulated a number of terms that had, to
his ear and in his community, been lost except for a few among
the poor and most rural:
Ancestors, Fore-elders
Agriculture, Earth-tillage
Beauty, Fairhood
Caution, Forewit
Commandment, Bodeword
Environs, Outskirts
Ignite, Kindle
Incantation, Spell
Liberty, Freedom
Library, Book-room, book-cove
Labyrinth, Maze
Miracle, Wondertoken
Merchant, Chapman
Republic, Commonwealth
Reprimand, Upbraid
Residence, Wonstead
Conclusion, Upshot
To disrupt, to to-break
Conscience, Inwit
Vicinity, Neighbourhood
Oblique, Slanting
Obstructive, Hindersome
Prudence, Forewit.65
Of the second group he declared :
Against what I have said of the resources of pure English for the
outbuilding of our speech from the word-stores of the land-folk, and
by branch-words from its own stems, I might be challenged to show
some such words as might have been found instead of those that we
have taken from Latin, Greek, or French ; and therefore I give a few
of such ones, though I do not call on my readers to take them up, nor
bind myself to the use of them: —
Auction — Bode sale, bidding sale
Asterisk — Starkin
Accumulate — Upheap, upgather
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 37
Ab j ect — Downcast
Abrade — Outfray, outfret
Corrode
Altitude — Height, heightwiseness
Latitude — Breadth, breadthwiseness
Longitude — Length, lengthwiseness
Anticipate — Foreween, foretake
Annuity — Yeardole, yeargyld
Anniversary — Yearday, yeartide
Anti —
Re With, gain: —
Contra —
Antitheis — withsetting, withstalling
Contradict — Gainsay
Resist — Withstand
Retain — Withhold
Copious (speech) — Wordrich, outbuilt
Contaminate — Befoul
Co-operative Society — Trade-club, work-club
Continent — Mainland
Critic — Deemster, Demster
Criticism — Deemstery, deemsterhood
Curriculum (of study) — Loreway, loreline — course
Music — Gleecraft
Jurisprudence — Lawcraft
Arithmetic — Talecraft
Botany — Wortlot
Aesthetics — Tastecraft, tastelore, fairhood craft, or lore
Ethnology — Kincraft-lore, Mankincraft-lore
Astronomy — Starcraft, or lore
Pirate — Sea-rover
Electricity — Fireghost (ghost meaning not soul, but gast,
spiritus)
Enthusiasm — Faith-heat
Errata — Misprints, mispennings
Excerpts — Outcullings
Patois — Folk-speech
Disrupt — Forbreak
Destroy — Fordo
Dismiss — Forsend
Divorce — Forsunder
H ibernate — Winter-wone
38 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Glossary — Word-store, word-book
Homicide — Manslaughter
Library — Book-hoard
Interpolate — Infoist
Magnanimity — Greatmindedness
Vocabulary — Word-hoard
Mediocre — Middling
Mellifluent — Honeysweet
Meeting or congress of learned societies — Loromote
Obliged — Beholden
Concert — Gleemote
Convivial party — Mirthmote
Preface — Forespeech, forerede
Embassy — Statespell
Emporium — Cheapstow
Residence — Wonestead
Custom — Wont
Vibrate — Whiver
Apiary — Beestow
Aviary — Birdstow
Arboretum — Treestow.66
From these lists Barnes drew a firm conclusion. The native
words explain themselves by analogy, by familiarity. What
are not known can be guessed; and the guess would be accu-
rate. Foreign words are learned only by rote unless one is
schooled in foreign etymology. In a neat schema he illustrated
the principle. At the same time he was fruitfully adding to
his word suggestions :
English minds would understand No. 2 from No. I, but to under-
stand No. 4 they should learn No. 3.
I
2
3
4
Year
yearly
annus
annual
Brother
brotherly
frater
fraternal
Call
calling
voco
vocation
Cloth
clothmonger
drap
draper
Dove
dove-house
columba
columbarium
End
endly
finis
finally
Even
even-night
efen-niht
aquanox
equinox
Fore
forewarn
promoneo
premonish
Five
fivefold
quinque
quintuple
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST
39
Ghost
ghostly
spiritus
spiritual
Happy
happiness
felix
felicity
In
inly
inter
internally
Long
longwise
longitudo
longitudinal
Moon
moonsick
moonmad
luna
lunatick
Nothing
nothingness
nonens
nonenity
Out
outgate
exeo
exit
Out
outcast
ex j acio
eject
Plunge
plunger
pinso
piston
Rede
redeship
krino
criterion
Shade
shady
umbra
umbrageous
Till
tillage
ager colo
agriculture
Wrongwise
wrongwiseness
inaequum
iniquity
Firm
firmness
sto
stability.67
The three foregoing lists establish ten methods by which
Barnes sought new and native words:
1. The revival of obsolete native words: inwit.
2. The invigoration of obsolescent native words: chapman,
redeship.
3. The popularization throughout the speech of native words
restricted in area or class : spell, outskirts.
4. Direct translation of a foreign word into native equiv-
alents : great-mindedness.
5. Creation on Anglo-Saxon patterns of new synonyms, using
Old English word elements: Gleemote.
6. Utilization of sound Anglo-Saxon affixes: fairhood.
7. The promotion of native nouns out of phrasal units: out-
cullings.
8. Inducing the abdication of foreign terms by popularizing
their native counterparts: freedom, downcast, gainsay.
9. Increasing native words by adding to their parts of speech :
inly.
10. Independent creation of compounds to fit new situations
as Old English generously and sanguinely had done :
moonmad and faith-heat being no more absurd than
lunatic and enthusiasm.
It will be noted again that Barnes called upon his Dorset
for aid. Redeship and whiver and beholden were Dorset still,
40 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
though neglected elsewhere. It will be seen also that the teach-
er and parson in Barnes, mentioned in Chapter I as well, en-
tered into his motive and his selections. Character determines.
Certainly all that Barnes had experienced and thought was
guiding his hand as in Early England he first attempted a pro-
gram for the amelioration and correction of latinized English.
Much unites to make Early England significant in the purist
cycle. An outline renders parts of that contribution clear :
i. There is a specific critique of standard latinized English.
A. It is a mongrel language.
B. It incorporates needless importations.
C. Words could easily have been recovered instead from
Old English itself.
D. Words can be formed from genuine English roots and
stems.
E. Words can be adopted directly from the speech of
landfolk.
F. Other Teutonic tongues have maintained and pros-
pered with native formations.
G. Latinized English is difficult to learn because of the
foreign elements within it.
H. The unschooled are penalized in the pursuance of
education and the affairs of life.
I. In nations where native vocabularies are standard, all
levels employ the same vocabulary and learning comes
with equal ease to high and low.
J. Anglo-Saxon is slighted in the schools, thus perpetuat-
ing its abjection.
K. Latin and Greek are emphasized in the schools, thus
furthering the program of importation.
2. The prose of the book approximates a true native English.
It incorporates many native words already popular and
others of Barnes' invention or recovery.
3. The book supplies valuable lists of native words as replace-
ments for foreign elements in the speech.
A. It portrays at least ten methods by which English can
augment its present native word stock.
B. It demonstrates that native English equivalents of
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 41
latinized English words are plentiful, understandable,
and simply learned by all levels of men.
Few books are more interesting in the history of the Anglo-
Saxon tradition and none more important than An Outline of
English Speech-Craft. ,68 All that William Barnes had thought
about purity of speech, all he had learned, and all he had em-
ployed came to fruition here. It is a full blossoming. The
book can lay just claim to the label "monumental." On its
face the slender volume is an English Grammar. It goes far
beyond that. It is written in native English, nearly absolute
except for required contrast. It contains a thesaurus of native
restorations and neologisms. It reaffirms the philosophy of
purism and broadens the condemnation of foreign components.
It is multifaceted: a doctrine, an example, a selective diction-
ary. In the history of English linguistics there is no book truly
comparable to it, save one other work. That too was written
by Barnes, the following year.
Speech-Craft is thus a climax in purism. Certainly it is the
climax of Barnes' achievement. This has been recognized. The
Oxford English Dictionary quotes its title alone among Barnes'
works.69 Foreign editors regularly refer to it alone among his
scholarly books; the standard Spanish encyclopedia reports of
Barnes:
Se propuso restaurar la antigua lengua inglesa, a cuyo objeto publico
su Outline of English Speechcraft (1878), en que defendio la necesidad
de introducir profundas modificaciones en la gramatica inglesa.70
Local encyclopedias incline to a similar partiality:
As a philologist, Barnes attempted to restore the ancient English
speech. In his Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878) he substituted
for the usual grammatical nomenclature English compounds of his own
coining.71
After his death commemorative articles singled out Speech-
Craft as his signal linguistic production. One recalls that
Barnes' daughter termed it "one of William Barnes' favourite
mind children."72 It is definitely a book with a purpose. Read-
ily stated in the "Fore-Say," it is purism entire :
This little book was not written to win prize or praise ; but it is put
42 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
forth as one small trial, weak though it may be, towards the upholding
of our own strong old Anglo-Saxon speech, and the ready teaching of it
to purely English minds by their own tongue.73
Speech-Craft, thus designed as a "small trial . . . towards
the upholding of our own strong old Anglo-Saxon speech,
. . ." reaches out to greater ends:
I have tried, as I have given some so-thought truths of English
speech, to give the causes of them, and hope that the little book may
afford a few glimpses of new insight into our fine old Anglo-Saxon
tongue.74
Not alone was it to be a grammar, it was as well to be a
critique of the English language. That led to the formulation
of a criterion and judgment according to it. Barnes announced
his touchstones: '
The goodness of a speech should be sought in its clearness to the
hearing and mind, clearness of its breath-sounds, and clearness of mean-
ing in its words ; in its fulness of words for all the things and time-takings
which come, with all their sundrinesses, under the minds of men of the
speech, in their common life; in sound-sweetness to the ear, and glib-
ness to the tongue.75
Entering into Speech-Craft is a new experience, for it is a
new world of language, or an old world refurbished. In this
volume, as Baxter states, "the anglicising of William Barnes's
speech reaches its climax. He boldly puts away all derived or
foreignised words, and substitutes Saxon ones, or words
formed by himself from Saxon roots, in their place." 76 Barnes
did so with full premeditation. His manifesto acknowledges
itself a protest, a symbol, and a guide :
I have tried to teach English by English, and so have given English
words for most of the lore-words (scientific terms), as I believe they
would be more readily and more clearly understood, and since we can
better keep in mind what we do than what we do not understand, they
would be better remembered . . . there are tokens that, ere long the
English youth will want an outline of the Greek and Latin tongues ere
he can well understand his own speech.77
Close to his heart was "our fine old Anglo-Saxon tongue."
Using it, he depended upon interested consideration. "Whether
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 43
my lore-words are well chosen," he said, "is a question for the
reader's mind."78
How far he travelled is denoted at the commencement by
the terminology of the table of contents, here called by a Saxon
title. Except for a modicum of Latin it is Saxon, and that Latin
is transliterated in the text itself (to explicate his Saxon
terms, a key to each term is provided here) :
HEADS OF MATTER
Free Breathings (Vowels)
Breath-pennings ( Consonants )
Word-strain and Speech-strain (Accent, Emphasis)
Thing-names (Nouns)
Thing-sundrinesses (Variety of Nouns)
Thing Mark-words (Distinguishing Names)
Sex (Gender)
Kindred (Relations)
Size (Diminutives, Augmentatives)
Tale (Number)
Outshowing Mark Words (Demonstrative pronouns)
Persons (Personal Pronouns)
Suchness (Adjectives)
Pitches of Suchness (Degree — comparative, superlative)
Time-taking and Time-words (Verbs)
Intransitive ("Unoutreaching")
Transitive ("Outreaching")
Cause Time-takings (Active Voice)
Time-giving (Passive Voice)
Words in -ing ("Thing-shape" — participle; "Mark-word" — gerund)
Strong and Weak Time-words ("Moulded time words" — strong verbs;
"unmoulded time-words" — weak verbs)
Sundriness of Time-taking (Tense)
Helping Time-words, can, may, shall, must (Auxiliary Verbs)
Person, Tale, Mood, Time (Person, Number, Mood, Tense)
Historic Time-wording (Historical Past — "deeds of foretime")
Case (Nominative — "of-spoken things"; Vocative — "to-spoken things")
Way-marks and Stead-marks (Prepositions — "to-ness, from-ness")
Thought-wording, Speech-wording (Syntax; Predication)
Twin Time-takings (Conditional Clause: "hank time taking" —
independent clause: "hinge" — dependent clause)
Speech-trimming (Diction)
Miswording (Solecisms)
44 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Word-sameness (Synonyms)
Odd Wordshapes (Hybrid Words)
Wordiness (Verbosity)
Hard Breathing (Aspirates)
Mark Time-words (Participles)
Words of Speech-craft, and others (Glossary of Grammatical Terms)
Power of the Word-endings (Suffixes)
Goodness of a Speech (Choice of Words).79
As consistent as the book begins, it ends. Instead of "Index" it
possesses a "CLUE TO MATTERS HANDLED."
In Speech-Craft Barnes first consolidates and augments his
indictment of Latin English. Its actions condemn it. In the
first place, as he never tired of proving, Latinism had simply
supplanted sound English terms, a sort of Gresham's Law of
language. His criteria had included "fulness of words for all
the things and time-takings which come. . . ." Latinism had
undermined this gift present in English:
As to fulness, the speech of men who know thoroughly the making
of its words may be fullened from its own roots and stems, quite as far
as has been fullened Greek or German, so that they would seldom feel a
stronger want of a foreign word than was felt by those men who, having
the words rail and way, made the word railway instead of calling it
chemin de fer, or going to the Latin, via ferrea, or than Englishmen felt
with steam and boat, to go to the Greeks for the name of the steamboat,
for which English had no name at all. The fulness of English has not
risen at the rate of the inbringing of words from other tongues since
many new words have only put out as many old ones, as : —
immediately, anon,
(no saving of time here),
ignite kindle
annual yearly
machine jinny.
I have before me more than one hundred and fifty so-taken English
law-words which were brought into the English courts with the Norman
French tongue; but English speech did not therefore become richer by
so many words, because most of them thrust aside English ones. Judge
took the stead of dema; cause of sac; ball of borh; and the lawyers said
arson, for forburning, burglary for housebreach; and carrucate, for
ploughland; and King Alfred gave to English minds the matter of Greg-
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 45
ory's Pastoral with a greater share (nearly all) of pure English words,
than most English scholars could now find for it.80
Besides bringing in new, unneeded, full words, Latin Eng-
lish anatomized itself, so that a proportion of the speech is
now mongrel — utwy-speechwords" Barnes called the hybrid
substantives. They are, he contended, a perennial reproach to
English's own genius:
Twy-speechwords are a sore blemish to our English, as they seem
to show a scantiness of words which would be a shame to our minds ; as,
Sub-warder for under-warder.
Pseudo-sailor for sham-sailor.
Ex-king for rodless or crownless king.
Prepaid for forepaid.
Bi-monthly for fortnightly or every fortnight.81
Barnes sought every means to buttress his chief protests,
the death of native words and resources, with the employment
of unintelligible foreign terms when the native intelligible were
at hand. He presented the matter of euphony. "Sound-sweet-
ness to the ear" he had stipulated as a touchstone of language.
Latinism offended:
For sound-sweetness or glibness, we should shun, as far as we can,
the meeting of hard dead breath-pennings of unlike kinds. We have in
our true English too many of them . . . and then, as if we had not
enough of them, we have brought in a host of such ones from the Latin,
as in act, tract, inept, rapt.
Now forbend is a softer-sounded word than deflect*2
He had urged "clearness of meaning in . . . words." In
what others had called wealth of language, he discerned ambi-
guity and doubt. Doe, dough; pale, pail; sow, sew; and their
like, Barnes said, had complicated the English speech. The
wealth was often simply troublesome.
Barnes also turned to the positive. If Latinism had its
failings, Saxonism manifested great excellences. Foremost of
all, it was intelligible to all men :
The Latinish and Greekish wording is a hindrance to the teaching
of the homely poor, or at least the landfolk. It is not clear to them, and
some of them say of a clergyman that his Latinized preaching is too high
for them, and seldom seek the church.83
46 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
The obverse was true with native English :
With most English minds, and with all who have not learned the
building of Latin and Greek words, English ones may be used with fewer
mistakes of meaning than would words from those tongues; though
Englishmen should get a clearer insight into English wordbuilding ere
they could hope to keep English words to their true sundriness of mean-
ing.84
Put it to a test, Barnes urged:
Swan is a clue to the meaning of swanling, but none of cygnet; and
if a man knew that kyknos was the Greek for swan he might still be at
a loss for the meaning of -et, which is not a Greek ending.85
He was willing to put it a grander test too, the provision
of a whole lexicon of native terms. First, though, he glanced
at a favorite device for promoting the native vocabulary. He
was fond of it in his own prose; he argued:
Why should not English, like other tongues, more freely form words
with headings of case-words, as downfalls, incomings, off cuttings, out-
goings, upflarings, instead of the awkward falls-down, comings-in, cut-
tings-off, goings-out, flare-ups; or offcast (for cast-off) clothes; or a
downbroken (for a broken-down) schoolmaster; outlock or outlocking
(for a lockout) ; the uptaking beam (for the taking-up beam) of an en-
gine?86
Preparing his own recommendations for native usages,
Barnes was reminded of the work of the new English Dialect
Society. He confessed his ignorance of many of its discoveries,
but in its work he saw corroboration of his own endeavors :
And how should I know all of the older English, and the mighty
wealth of English words which the English Dialect Society have begun
to bring forth ; words that are not all of them other shapes of our words
of book-English, or words of their very meanings, but words of mean-
ings which dictionaries of book-English should, but cannot give, and
words which should be taken in hundreds (by careful choice) into our
Queen's English ? 87
So he approached the great and vital effort of demonstrat-
ing a lexicon of Saxon English suitable for modern communi-
cation. It was, he knew, a risky business. He expected disap-
proval from the obdurate, but he felt he deserved reasoned
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 47
estimation. If he erred in part, what of Latin English? The
best of men made notorious errors in it. "The so-seeming mis-
wordings (solecisms) of writers in the Latinized and Greek-
ish speech-trimming," he reminded the critical, "are not un-
common or unmarkworthy."88
For this task Barnes had been preparing for many years.
In one sense the prose of Speech-Craft was a practical exercise
in word-coining. In it Barnes was trying his skill, testing the
ring of Saxon sentences and of individual Saxon words. Both
are omnipresent. The Fore-Say comments, in a style almost
completely Saxon, that "Speech was shapen of the breath-
sounds of speakers, for the ears of hearers, and not from
speech-tokens (letters) in books." 89 Words themselves, he
continued, testing his neologisms in use prior to tabulating a
fuller lexicon, "are of breath-sounds, and in some words are
one-sounded, as man ; and manliness."90 The book presents hun-
dreds of such usages, all valuable in themselves and as rehears-
al. "And surely," Barnes writes typically,
. . . when the singular shape ends in -st, our Universities or some high
school of speech ought to give us leave to make it somely by the old end-
ing -en or -es instead of -s — fist, fisten, fistes; nest, nesten, nestes. What
in the world of speech can be harsher than fists, lists, nests f91
- — the words shape and somely being for him by now invariable
synonyms for the Latinic form and plural.
Outside his formal lists, too, are a multitude of words
throughout the text deliberately offered as replacements for
the Latinism they accompany:
grammar : speech-craft
philology: speech-lore
accent: word-strain
emphasis : speech-strain
modulation : speech-tuning
concrete: matterly ("as a man, a tree, a stone.")
abstract: unmatterly ("as faith, hope, love, speed, emptiness/')
nouns: things
proper nouns: one-head thing-names
patronymics : sire-names
male gender: "carl sex, as a man."
female gender: "the weaker or quean sex, as a girl."
48 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
neuter gender: "the unsexly things, as a stone."
transitive : outreaching
intransitive : unoutreaching
verb: time-word
tense: time
Now or hereat
I am, or I love, or am loved.
Heretofore done
I was, or I loved, or was loved.
Heretofore ongoing
I was, or I was a-loving, or I did love.
Now ended
I have been, or I have loved, or have been loved.
Heretofore ended
I had been, or I had loved, or had been loved.
Heretofore ongoing, ended
I had been a-loving.
Hereafter ongoing
I shall be, or I shall love, or shall be loved.
Hereafter ended
I shall have been, or shall have loved, or shall have been loved.
Hereafter ended, ongoing
I shall have been a-loving.
nominative case: the of-spoken thing
vocative case : the to-spoken thing
propositions: thought-wordings ("Men walk and birds fly.")
synonym : word-sameness
euphony: sweet-soundness
euphonious: sound-good (Thus "waterlode for aqueduct and
waterfall for cataract are more sound-good.")
participle : mark-timeword
past participle : ended mark-timeword
present participle: on-going mark-timeword
compound words : clustered words
consonants : breath-pennings
vowels : free-breathings.92
Twenty-four years earlier Barries had published a previous
grammar, A Philological Grammar. To compare the technical
terms he recommended there with those he employed in
Speech-Craft is pertinent. It proves that in some ways he had
advanced far in Saxonism; but it proves also that by 1854 he
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST
49
had determined a basic terminology that was in part to mutate
but that had already the essential quality which he sought. In
1854 he had explained: "Grammar is the science of speech."93
The Saxon version of that in 1878 was "Speech-craft (Gram-
mar), called by our Saxon forefathers Staef-craeft or Letter-
craft, is the knowledge or skill of a speech."94 A sampling
clarifies both the similarity and the progress :
Philological Gr. (1854) Speech-Craft (1878)
Standard English
intransitive verb
transitive verb
vowels
consonants
various
formation
proper noun
conjunction
adverbs
aphaeresis
ecthlipsis
apocope
predicate
protasis
apodosis
grammar
science
one-thing verb
two-thing verb
pure breathsounds
clipped or articulate
breathsounds
sundry
formation
proper noun
conjunction
mode-words
aphaeresis
ecthlipsis
apocope
predicate
protasis
apodosis
grammar
science
unoutreaching verb
outreaching verb
breathsounds,
free-breathings
breath-pennings,
clippings
sundry
shape
one-head thing-name
link-word
under-markwords
foredocking
outcasting, out-
striking
end-lopping
thought-wording
hank
hinge
speech-craft
skill.
On page 47 of Speech-Craft appears the heading, "Words
of Speech-Craft and Others, Englished." This is a historical
list. Many of the terms here formally listed are worth record :
Words of Speech-Craft, and Others, Englished
Abnormal. Unshapely, queer of shape, odd.
Absorb. Forsoak.
Accelerate. To onquicken, quicken.
Accent. Word-strain.
Accusative (case). End-case, the case of a thing which is the end
or aim of a time-taking.
Alliteration. Mate-pennings.
Acoustics. Sound-lore, hearing-lore.
50 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Adulation. Flaundering, glavering.
Adverb. An under-markword.
Aeronaut. Air-farer.
Aerology. Air-lore.
Agglutinate. To upcleam, to cleam up.
Alienate. To unfrienden.
Ambiguous. Twy-sided, twymeaning.
Anachronism. A mistiming.
Ancestor. Fore-elder, kin-elder.
Anniversary. Year-day.
Annihilate. To fornaughten.
Antepenultimate (breath-sound). Last but two.
Antithesis. An atsetting.
Aphaeresis. Foredocking of a word.
Aphorisms. Thought-cullings.
Apocope. End-lopping.
Atmosphere. Walkin-air.
Aqueduct. Waterlode.
Asyndeton. Linklessness.
Bibulous. Soaksome.
Bilateral. Two-sided.
Botany. Wortlore.
Chemistry. Matter-lore, the science of matter.
Clause. A word-cluster in a thought-wording.
Colophon. Book-end.
Conjunction. Link-word.
Correlative (words). Mate-words.
Deciduous. Fallsome.
Democracy. Folkdom.
Depilatory. Hairbane.
Demagogue. Folk-leader, folk's ringleader.
Desecrate. Unhallow.
Deteriorate. Worsen.
Dictionary. A word-book.
Equilibrium. Weight-evenness.
Ecthlipsis. An outcasting or outstriking, as of a sound.
Electricity. Matter-quickness.
Equivalent. Worth-evenness.
Epenthesis. An inputting or inthrusting of a sound or clipping
into a word.
Etymology. Word-building, word-making, word-shapening.
Foliate. To leafen.
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 51
Genitive (case). The offspring case.
Garrulity. Wordiness, talksomeness.
Horizon. Sky-sill, sky-line.
Hyphen. A tie-stroke.
Idiom. A folk's-wording.
Imperative (mood). The bidding mood.
Initial. Word-head.
Laxative. Loosensome.
Lecture. Lore-speech.
Literature. Book-lore.
Lithography. Stone-printing.
Negative. Fornaysome.
Noun. A thing-name, thing word, name-word.
Onomatopoeia. A mocking name.
Panacea. Allheal.
Perambulator (the child's carriage). Push-wainling.
Pedigree. Kin-stem, forekin-stem.
Plural (number). The somely (number).
Posterity. Afterkin.
Pronouns (personal). A name-token, a stead-word.
Religion. Faith-law.
Salubrious. Healthy, halesome.
Satellite. Henchman.
Scintillate. Sparkle.
Rhetoric. Rede-speech.
Sophist. Wordwise.
Sophistry. Rede-guile, rede-cunning.
Tense. Time.
Vocabulary (L. vocabulum, a word). A word-list, word-book,
word-store.
Oration. Rede-speech.
Photograph. Sunprints.95
As in the native words of Early England Barnes here em-
ployed all the methods for word coining he had slowly learned
during his lifetime. Some of the expressions are direct Anglo-
Saxon translation of the Latin or Greek; some are counterparts
of the same meaning. All are logical. It was not his purpose
to provide a replacement for every Latin term; he meant to
prove a method and show the ample means available to English.
As an entirety, Speech-Craft is a clumsy narrative. It al-
ludes incessantly to Greek and Latin. It etymologizes and diva-
52 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
gates. From that tendency, however, arise interesting side-
issues. There is a sound rationale of the adventitious "1" in
could; a sound explanation of the Anglo-Saxon participle -end
and the -ung with their present confusion in -ing. There is a
nice touch of humor. Discussing the wanton uh," Barnes re-
lates:
Some Englishmen would say, 'The 'ammer is on the hanvil' ; and
some have been known to say, ' 'enry 'it 'orace with the 'ollow of 'is
'and. . . .' Shall we soon hear 'Wet the 'ook with a wetstone' for 'Whet
the hook with a whetstone'?96
And Speech-Craft is a superb example of modernized
Anglo-Saxon English. Judgment requires patience, a fine dis-
crimination and subtlety. At the beginning of the book the
reader is repelled. He seems to fight his way through a thicket
of words. The Saxon terminologies are brambles and traps;
one trips and battles. The first taste of a whole Saxonism is un-
comfortable and unpleasant. It is amazingly difficult. But as
the reader progresses another remarkable thing occurs. The
prose has, quietly unbeknownst, become supple, easy and nat-
ural. The reader accepts it with no awareness of difficulty
or indeed of difference. The initial shock of Saxon English is
the great barrier; once past the first pages, reading is simple
and innocent. If this be so, it is a valuable discovery. Barnes
had put his Saxonism to the test. It seems to pass.
Mrs. Baxter was not sure. The drift of English culture
alone, she thought, combatted change, in fact perpetuated the
modern fancy:
The book certainly shows that it is possible to keep language pure ;
but the hope that our mongrel English will ever by a national effort be
purged from the foreign words which now form nearly half the lan-
guage of general use, is the dream of an enthusaist. The tendency of
modern languages seems, like that of the pure mountain brook, to be
swollen with tributary streams, which become incorporated in it, till
no power can divide the different waters.97
William Barnes himself, convinced that "our speech will go
to wreck if the half-learned writers . . . follow their own
way," put his own verdict on Speech-Craft, and simultaneously
on the whole linguistic effort of his life. "The Athenaeum
thinks I am an enthusiast," he said, weighing the judgment,
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 53
and then he added, "but that my book will do good, as it teaches
many overlooked (I say little-known) points of speech lore."98
Out of the dreams of enthusiasts came change, came progress,
came hope for the world. It might be, he thought, that en-
thusiast or no, his dreams were negotiable, and from their real-
ization the world might prosper.
Certainly the condemnation Barnes faced in his day was
frequently silly. He was forced to defend the obvious. In a
prose representative of the final simplicity of his Saxonism, and
of the trivial opposition to his thesis, the last paragraph of
Speech-Craft declares :
There came out in print some time ago a statement wonderful to me,
that it had been found that the poor landfolk of one of our shires had only
about two hundred words in their vocabulary, with a hint that Dorset
rustics were not likely to be more fully worded. There can be shown to
any writer two hundred thing-names, known to every man and woman
of our own village, for things of the body and dress of a labourer, with-
out any mark-under, or time-words, or others, and without leaving the
man for his house, or garden, or the field or his work."
Whether the vitality, genius, and resources of native Eng-
lish were overlooked or little-known, Barnes continued to labor
with hope. If the course of the language could be altered so
that English and its speakers would both be ennobled by a bet-
ter growth, he would try. To that he was dedicated. Speech-
Craft, with its successor, is the fullest dedication of that ambi-
tion. Its qualities are apparent:
1. It consolidates, advances, and broadens the protest against
English Latinism.
2. It is composed almost throughout in Saxon English.
A. It provides in context many Saxon substitutes for
latinized grammatical terminology.
B. It provides a test for the general readability of a
purged English. Unfamiliarity and novelty make the
initial reading rugged; by the end of the book the
prose seems unforced and fluent.
3. It furnishes a formal glossary of many native synonyms
for Latinism.
4. It is a key document, for style, for argument, and for
procedure, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Chapter III
THE CULMINATION
This ilk book es translate
Into Inglis tong to rede
For the love of Inglis lede
Inglis lede of Ingland,
For the commun at understand.
Cursor Mundi.
What he had attempted with Speech-Craft pleased William
Barnes. He had proved to his satisfaction that native English
was an articulate and complete instrument. All his life he had
striven to educate his country people, in school and in church;
all his life he had seen them halted, dismayed, and discouraged
by "book English."1 "Inbrought foreign words" had cursed
their enlightenment.2 The values of art and science had been
shut from them by the "hard words" of the schools. This was no
theory ; it was a fact. He had seen the dismay and the discourage-
ment for over seventy long years, and he had suffered com-
passionately from it. Speech-Craft was a test product to deter-
mine the usability of a native prose in matters of education. It
had, he felt, succeeded. The real and crowning push, however,
was now to be.
Barnes intended An Outline of Rede-Craft as the supreme
test and the supreme proof of his theories and his theses.3 He
published it two years after Speech-Craft. Rede-Craft was put-
ting his Saxon prose to its severest trial. It is a whole textbook
on abstruse philosophy — Logic — written in Saxon English. If
that vocabulary served in this, it then was incontestably equal
to all tasks. From the "Fore-Say" (Preface) to the "Clue to
Matters Handled" (Index) he intended it to be consistently
Saxon. In fact, his doctrine would not stand or fall by the
success or failure of a book; the philosophy of pure language is
not to be curtailed by a single work. Rede-Craft is extremist,
but Barnes was willing to push his Saxonism to the verge to
assay it under the most stringent conditions.
So he turned to Logic. It was admittedly an Elusinian,
54
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 55
difficult subject. There was more than that. The democracy
on which his doctrine of purism is founded reveals itself in his
preface. Why he wrote Rede-Craft and why he wrote it in
Saxon English is stated there :
I have thought that homely men who may not have taken up logic
at the University, nor have been led through Euclid's Elements at
school, and may not have to wrangle in Latin with three opponents on a
thesis in the schools, may seek an insight into rede-craft outshown in
English with English lore-words (terms of science).4
He raised a figurative flag of revolt. More than redefining
a thousand terms, he now wished to liberate the very word
"English" itself from an irksome bondage. His Saxon book
on Logic was to be written in actual English, the true English.
On fundamentals he would equivocate and compromise no
longer :
I own that I was to blame that I did not give my meaning of English
speech in my little book of English speech-craft. It was Teutonic Eng-
lish, and not the Englandish of our days, which, however, I call English
as freely as do other Englishmen.5
The gage was thrown. It was English versus the Latin usurper.
Before entering upon the textbook proper, Barnes once
again recounted the inherent fertility of native English, espe-
cially evident in the affixes. Of them he selected -some and
for-< as representative symbols :
-Some is a word most useful for a word-ending, and already in Eng-
lish, and we are as free to give it in a fitting place as were our Saxon
fore-fathers, or as are the Germans to make words with it in the shape
-sam.6
Hardly less helpful was for-, he stressed, regretting the obso-
lescence of words like fortake and fordone, forswear and
forcut?
As he readied for his herculean task of rewriting Logic
into modern Saxon, Barnes confessed that in a measure he was
bound to fail. Many terms are too abstract, too imprecise,
for exact replacement. Even common words are frequently
ambiguous. The lack was not in Saxon English, but in the Lat-
inism. "A man who was angry against my little book in speech-
56 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
craft," Barnes narrates, "challenged me to substitute a word
for river, a not very easy task." It was a not very easy task
because no one after all is certain just what a river is as distinct
from streams that are not rivers. Native synonyms are plen-
teous: "brooks, bourns, becks, dills . . . main-stream. . . ."8
Small wonder that if river is hard to distinguish, to distinguish
terms less concrete should deserve even more tolerance. None-
theless he was willing to try. Mrs. Baxter speaks of the result
as she saw it:
In the eightieth year of William Barnes's life his book named Rede-
craft was published ... it forms a clear handbook to the art of logic;
but unfortunately for its popularity, the aiming at extreme anglicising of
style had led the author to almost coin a new vocabulary of logical terms,
which to the general reader require as much to be learnt as the usual
Latin terms.9
The hazard is true only in part. Whenever Barnes intro-
duced a new term in Rede-Craft he first carefully paired it with
the standard expression. Attentive reading and remembrance
thereby solve a good share of the difficulty. The process is
considered and considerate; a strong Ariadne thread is pro-
vided. The reader need but follow it thoughtfully. Barnes'
first page shows this program:
While 'Rede-craft' may be taken for logic, or the art of reasoning,
'Rede-ship' would mean an act or form of reasoning. 'Rede-matter'
(praedicabile) is speech-matter, or what may be said of things.
Speech-matters (praedicabilia) are
Kind (genus)
Hue (species)
Odds (differentia)
Selflihood (proprium)
Haplihood (accidens).10
Nor is the English finally fashioned necessarily arcane.
Knowing the definitions and recalling the basic fabric of Eng-
lish, one often reads easily enough. Here is Barnes' account of
logomachy:
We should be aware of the many forms of rede-ship of guile, by
which the cunning redes-man, instead of putting at once that which he
would give as the naked truth to the understanding, tries to win the
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 57
reason through the heart, or self-love, or love of money, or shame, or
fear, or any other feeling. . . . There is a vast amount of wrangling
which is idle for the finding of truth, and kindles anger for want of clear
definitions which cannot be sought too carefully; for when one man up-
holds against another a so-taken truth under a name by which the other
understands something else, their reasonings do not run on the same line,
and cannot reach the same upshot.11
Not that such ease in invariable. The substitute vocabulary
must be remembered. Logic itself is involved. Simplified vo-
cabulary, itself a logical process of involvement by way of de-
involving, may appear bizarre. For these reasons there are in
isolation what seem peculiar sentences in Rede-Craft:
If he wants to bring out an unstraitened ayesome up-shot, the middle-
step-end may be the fore-end to the higher step, and hinder end to the
lower step.12
(Previous definitions disclose this as "If one wants to determine
an unconditional, affirmative conclusion, the minor premise may
be considered. . . .")
A fore-begged putting is one that begins, in English, with some such
words as if (in Saxon Gif, give or grant or allow thou), or though,
which is, by root-meaning 'think' or 'put thou' and thus the wrangler or
reasoner begs that his thought-wording may be given, or allowed, or
thought, or put down for the time to be true.13
(This refers simply to the matter of hypothesis.)
If he wants an unstraitened naysome upshot, the middle term must
gainsay the higher step, and be hinder end to the under step. . . .14
("If he wants an unconditional negative conclusion. . . .")
In-lurking rede-ship . . . in-wit rede-ship . . . fore-begged thought-
puttings. . . .15
Recalling the nature of Saxon and the nature of Logic,
difficulties in the prose dissolve. Sentences read as easily as UA
flaw or an unsoundness in rede-craft is a thought-putting which
is unsound, or cheatsome, or guilesome."16
Moreover before hasty decision condemn Barnes' nomen-
clature in Rede-Craft, it is well to remember that each science
has a jargon of its own. The special jargon of philosophic
Logic is not least notorious. Barnes' Rede-Craft is hardly
more weird than the standard English of much orthodox phil-
osophy. It is questionable which of the two terminologies —
58 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
academic philosophy's or Barnes' substitutes — would more non-
plus the neophyte. An authoritative contemporary account in
standard philosophic English is the Dictionary of Philosophy
and Psychology. Its discussion of "Syllogism" reads typically:
The operation called colligation by Whewall, which consists in
bringing the different premises together and applying them, the one to
another, or to a repetition of itself, in a particular way, wherein lies all
that calls for sagacity in deductive reasoning, is then no part of the
syllogism.17
Rede-Craft said of a syllogism, "If he wants an unstraitened
naysome upshot, the middle term must gainsay the higher step,
and be hinder end to the under step." The academic Dictionary
writes:
An argument consisting of a single syllogism is a monosyllogism, one
of more than one a polysyllogism, called also monosyllogistic and poly-
syllogistic proof.
On performing an ordinary syllogism, we have in mind the dictum
de emni as our legitimizing principle. . . .
The second and third figures can be reduced to the first apagog-
ically :
. . . decurtate syllogism . . . didascalic. . . ,18
Faced by the two languages a fair critic would re-summon
any impulsive malediction laid against Barnes' Saxon prose in
Rede-Craft. The very subject of Logic is the bete noir; the
language but seems to be. In her triste remonstrance Mrs.
Baxter had only dim perception of that.
Having paired the two symbols initially, Barnes rapidly
increased the ratio of native terms throughout Rede-Craft.
Speech-Craft appears elementary after it. Many of his terms
are listed below; it is only just to remind that the oddity of
some is conditioned by the equal oddity of the originals. The
true import is whether Barnes' recommendations are at least
as logical, or more easily learned and understood; and whether
these words symbolize a native vigor and variety serviceable
for the future welfare of the language :
Preface, foreword. Fore-say.
Thought. Redeship.
Explained, exhibited. Outshown.
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 59
Terms of science. Lore-words.
Native-born. Home-born.
Suffix. Word-ending.
Prefix. Word-heading.
Art. Craft.
Reasoning, counselling. Rede.
"Disputation or argumentation in the higher meaning of unangry
and learned disputations in the schools." Wrangling.
Logic. Rede-craft.
"Speech-matter, or what may be said of things." Rede-matter.
"The Being of a single thing not further formarked into lower
under-shares." One-hood.
Separable, divisible. Sundersome.
Resemblance. Suchness.
Relative. Kinsman, kinswoman.
Apparelled state. Cladness.
Subject of sentence. Fore-end.
Predication. Latter-end, aft-end.
Contrary. Thwartsome.
Contradiction. Gainsaying.
Hypothetical proposition. Fore-begged thought-putting.
Premise. Fore-putting.
Affirmative. Ayesome.
Negative. Naysome.
Universal. Allsome.
Singular. Onesome.
Indefinite. Unmarksome.
Deny. Gainsay.
Dilemma. Two-horned rede-ship.
Conscience. Inwit.
Cause. Outcoming.
Fallacy. Flaw.
Spiritual. Ghostly.
Definition. For-marking.
Glossary, index. Clue to matters handled.
Demonstrated. Outshown.
Quantity. Muchness.
Quality. Suchness.
Opposites. Overthwartings.
Subject. Speech-thing.
Syllogism. Three-stepped rede-ship.
Major proposition. Head or first step.
60 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
r
Minor proposition. Under or middle step.
Conclusion. Upshot or last step.
Conditional. Straitened.
False. Guilesome, cheatsome.19
To an educated mind much of Barnes' terminology above
seems strained and remote. After many years that mind has
learned foreign words and etymologies so well that the once
foreign seems native and nimble. To the uneducated eye, how-
ever, the vocabulary above would appear no more impossible
than the vocabularly of philosophy itself utilized by Alfred
Whitehead or a dozen other able logicians. It is worth ponder-
ing how much the history of the world hinges upon the masses'
understanding of words — for instance, how different even
"masses" look if they are seen to be just a lot of folksy people
or students, or workers, or fathers and mothers, or sons and
daughters, or laborers, or men and women. There too are the
hobgoblins of Latin word-origin, like Socialism and Commu-
nism; would they be so fearful if they were called something
from Saxon-English, like Working-Together, or Owning-
Together?
In many instances, perhaps in most, Barnes' synonyms
would be more understandable, at least more guessable, and
thus more facilely learned and more surely retained. Perhaps
Barnes proved his point. The educated determine what and
how the uneducated shall learn, and in what language the text-
books are written. The Barnesian innovations may be more
helpful to the unschooled. But if they look clumsy to the
schooled, textbooks will continue to be written without them.
The change could be accomplished, just as simplified spelling,
the metric system, and the twenty-four hour clock could be
adopted. But to do either is to many men, comfortable in
habitual usages, more trouble than to wrestle on with present
ways. Barnes had perhaps proved his point, but it is as though
the men who could alter the course of language turned their
heads away.
Once again, this time in Rede-Craft, Barnes pleaded for a
change in vocabulary, he emphasized some means of perform-
ing that change, and he replaced hundreds of standard latinic
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 61
terms with words of Saxon provenance. Rede-Craft was his
final considerable publication. So far as the general world was
concerned, he rested his case. From now until his death he
attacked the problem of speech, but privately. He published
no more.
In this final volume of a long life of linguistic thought, doc-
trine, endeavor, and achievement, Barnes summed up the four
basic themes of his philological faith. They have many tan-
gents and appanages, but the granite themes stand out:
i. By adopting Latin, French, and Greek terms, the English-
speaking world has discarded and repudiated thousands of
good, strong, and pleasing native English words.
2. The inevitable result has been an alteration of the English
vocabulary so drastic that English has become unintelli-
gible in great measure to the humble and unschooled. The
basic population has been disinherited and handicapped
in the pursuit of learning.
3. By borrowing from abroad, English has crippled or sacri-
ficed its own natural genius for rich development and
self-expansion. This is to injure English at its funda-
mentals, and to dismiss a wealth of inspiration and growth.
It is self-mutilation.
4. Through its own great resources English can supply even
now all the words necessary and desired for all the affairs
of life. These words, branching from a dozen inherent
methods of enlargement, would be various, interesting,
and fulfilling. They would have as well the high and dem-
ocratic virtue of intelligibility to all men. They would be
easier learned and better retained. They would be at
least as excellent as the imported words, and far more
desirable, for reasons of comprehension, variety, and the
rebirth of a flourishing people's language.
William Barnes asked for a Renaissance of the native Eng-
lish language. What happened to the words he sponsored in
that endeavor and to the life-long effort he expended is an
illuminating lesson in human nature.
Chapter IV
THE OED
The most kingly dictionary in English is honored with
several titles. Some name it Murray's English Dictionary,
some the New English Dictionary, and some the Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary. A few call it the Historical English Diction-
ary.1 But one very notable group of men traditionally describe
it as the Society's Dictionary.2 This is a significant name, and
it connects at once with the activities and achievement of Wil-
liam Barnes. It also introduces a mystery. This matter, im-
portant and serious in its implications, is worth investigation;
it can prove valuable to scholarship. One dark corner may be
revealed if not resolved. The Philological Society, whose
name is attached to the great Dictionary, is the oldest unin-
termitted organization devoted to English scholarship.3
Founded in 1842, it proposed to investigate "the structure, the
affinities, and the history of laguages."4 From its beginnings
the Society's membership was large and distinguished. More
than two hundred of the most conspicuous scholars in English
studies were constituent members, men like Bosworth, Car-
nett, Hallam, Kemble, Thorpe, and Trench. Sober in purpose
and active in production, the Society at once issued papers on
English dialects, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English grammar,
animal and plant names, and etymology. In a short while it
incorporated an even newer cenacle of accomplished scholars :
The last and present generation of English scholars began to enter
the society soon after its foundation, Furnivall, Wheatley, Morris,
Ellis, and Sweet beginning their contributions in the sixties, and Mur-
ray and Skeat in the following decade. The infusion of new blood . . .
brought with it enthusiasms and not unrealizable dreams. . . .5
William Barnes apparently was not invited into member-
ship; this is only a minor puzzle. Perhaps the Society did not
consider him enough the academic researcher. When the So-
ciety's members executed its "not unrealizable dream" it did,
however, instigate a matter for interested inquiry. First, it
62
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 63
is well to establish a history. Barnes was known to the Society,
and he knew it well. In 1854 he cited Murray's work on the
subjunctive.6 He quoted Furnivall's studies on Chaucer.7 Most
revealing of all, the Society invited papers from him, and
moved, as Furnivall wrote him, to print his
A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect if he would substitute
the usual terms for the unusual ones — as voice (sounds), voicings (vow-
els), clippings for consonants, mate-wordings for synonyms, &c, there
being no reason to introduce such quaint and unhappy words — what
notion does clippings convey to one's mind? — especially as other usual
terms — diphthongs, pronouns &c, are retained, and 'Vowels' used
more than once.8
Barnes bowed to the demand, and the paper was printed
by a Berlin publisher. This was 1863. Six years previously,
Furnivall had broached the idea of a giant, new, all-inclusive
dictionary to the Society. "The first requirement ... is that
it should contain every word occurring in the literature of the
language. . . ."9 In his letter to Barnes, Furnivall tacitly ad-
mits his and the Society's knowledge of certain of Barnes' neo-
logisms. In the Grammar those words were struck out. In a
later letter to Barnes, however, Furnivall once again alludes
to the philologist's Saxon neologisms, this time presented in two
papers to the Philological Society. On June 4, 1864, Furnivall
wrote, significantly:
I read your papers last night at our meeting, but I am sorry to say
that our members did not show much sympathy with them. When the
two words are both in use, as 'desert' and 'wilderness,' they thought that
a distinction of meaning has grown up, and if not, they would sooner
have two words than one for the same thing, as it prevents repetition. A
few of the shorter words they liked, but all the old ones that have be-
come strange to them, they did not want revived. The classical feeling
was stronger than I had expected. . . . Your Tiw is not accepted.10
From this it is plain that the Philological Society was
. . . clearly not inclined to become "pioneers in the effort to restore the
Saxon language" ; they clung to their Latinized language, and were con-
tent to elucidate Saxon English as one treats of a dead language, but
not to bring it back to its purity in daily use.11
64 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
In its criticism the Society failed to realize Barnes' conten-
tion that synonymity could easily be advanced through the
native word stock itself. Nevertheless, it is indisputable that
Furnivall personally and the Philological Society as an entity
knew of Barnes, knew of his theories, and knew specifically of
a number of his Saxon restorations.
For many years the dominating personality of the Society
was Frederick James Furnivall (i 825-1910), a vigorous man
of protean activities, a student of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ten-
nyson, and Browning, the founder of the Early English Text
Society, the Chaucer Society, and the Browning Society, a
mighty scholar, and an ambitious lexicographer. One reference
sums up his interests, concluding with the most perdurable and
the most relevant:
During half a century he promoted the study of early English liter-
ature, partly by his own work as editor, and partly by the foundation of
learned societies. . . . He was the honorary secretary of the Philological
Society, and was one of the original promoters of the Oxford New Eng-
lish Dictionary. He cooperated with its first editor, Herbert Coleridge,
and after his death was for some time principal editor during the prelim-
inary period of the collection of material.12
In a statement containing a phrase remarkable for its later im-
plication here, a friend wrote more closely of that connection :
Furnivall had joined the Philological Society in 1847, became one of
its two honorary secretaries in 1853, and sole secretary in 1862 . . . and
he grew more and more convinced that these fore-fathers5 voices should
be made available and significant to modern man.13
Herbert Coleridge died, and in 1861 Furnivall became ac-
knowledged leader of the greatest endeavor of the Society.
From 1 86 1 to 1878 he was editor of the realizable dream of
the Society, a new and complete dictionary of the English
language. Considering the actual position of William Barnes
with the Society and its finished dictionary, examination of the
stipulated rules, requirements, and policy for that production
becomes almost frightening. The abyss between program and
practice astounds and dazes.
The prospectus for the dictionary proclaimed that com-
pleteness was the special aim and glory of the work:
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 65
The principal points . . . were those which determined the attitude
of the society upon the subject of a dictionary from this time on: that a
dictionary should be complete, and should exercise no principle of exclu-
sion for the purpose of establishing a puristic standard, or upon grounds
of obsoleteness, foreignness, or localism. . . ,14
Not only should the projected dictionary contain every
word occurring in the language, excluding none for whatever
reason of morals or scholarly prejudice, but "In the treatment
of individual words the historical principle will be uniformly
adopted."13 It was required thereby that the first employer or
restorer of a word be credited with it. What the Society in-
tended the book to encompass is unequivocally stated in the
instructions it dispatched in 1879 to all its volunteer contribu-
tors. They are of high consequence :
Make a quotation for every word that strikes you as rare, obsolete,
old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way.
Take special note of passages which show or imply that a word is
either new or tentative, or needing explanation as obsolete or archaic, and
which thus help to fix the date of its introduction or disuse.
Make as many quotations as you can for the ordinary words, espe-
cially when they are used significantly, and tend by the context to explain
or suggest their own meaning.16
W. W. Skeat, a member of the Society, cautioned the or-
ganization moreover not to overlook dialect words which have
appeared in standard communication. He wrote :
It has sometimes happened that a word which in olden times may fairly
be said to have been in general use ... is now only heard in some pro-
vincial dialect . . . and, on the other hand, a word which was once
used, as it would seem from the evidence, in one dialect only, has now
become familiar to everybody.17
Cognizant of the intentions of the dictionary, Skeat stressed
that such dialect words must not be spurned.
Those were the instructions; and a regiment of cooperat-
ing students the world over bent to the task of collecting the
English vocabulary. Of the multitude none was busier and, in
this connection, more momentous than Furnivall, as collector
and then as editor who shaped, chose, discarded what was
I
66 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
received. Many accounts tell of this. The later editor, James
A. H. Murray, declared of Furnivall:
He has been by far the most voluminous of our 'readers,' and the
slips in his handwriting and the clippings by him from printed books,
and from newspapers and magazines, form a very large fraction of the
millions in the Scriptorium.18
Indeed, just what fraction Furnivall directly contributed can be
discovered. For the initial issues of the Dictionary , its intro-
duction tells, he submitted 30,000 quotations.19 His influence,
moreover, was pervasive in equally effective ways :
... he never ceased to contribute liberally to its stores, both from the
publication of these societies and from other sources, including his daily
morning and evening papers. If the Dictionary at one period quotes the
Daily News and at another the Daily Chronicle, it is because Furnivall
had changed his paper in the meanwhile. Through his early organiza-
tion of the collecting and sub-editing, and his life-long contributions,
the work of Furnivall pervades every page of the Dictionary, and has
helped in a great degree to make it what it is.20
One man who, it seems, was not encouraged to contribute
was William Barnes. Despite his protracted attention to lan-
guage, his durable interest, and his long research and publica-
tion in vocabulary, his name is not mentioned in the extensive
lists provided in the introduction of the OED either as reader
or selected contributor from the year 1858 to contemporary
times.21
So it was that the OED took shape. Five factors are em-
phatic:
1. The declared intention was to include every word of
the English language, however new and tentative, or obsolete
and archaic. Nothing should be excluded.
2. Proper credit was to be assigned to each writer who
first introduced a word, first employed it in a special capacity,
or restored it to literary knowledge. This was a tenet of the
proud Historical Principles of the book's title.
3. The Dictionary was under the directive control of F. J.
Furnivall for some twenty formative years. Those who knew
Furnivall described him as "enthusiastic . . . and . . . con-
vinced that . . . forefathers' voices should be made available
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 67
and significant to modern man." That was also a major part
of the linguistic ambition and practice of William Barnes.
4. William Barnes introduced into the English language,
by way of reputably published and widely reviewed books, many
words that may fairly be labelled "new and tentative" and, as
well, "obsolete and archaic." Words of these categories were
directly called for by the plan of the OED.
5. These productions and actual words were known to
the sponsoring agent of the OED, the Philological Society,
and to Furnivall, the controlling hand during the Dictionary's
first generation of shaping.
This, then, was the situation as the Dictionary progressed,
as it was printed, first appearing two years after Barnes' death,
and as it culminated with the twelve volumes and a Supplement
in 1933. What of Barnes' works and words? How were they
accepted? What place in history does this Dictionary, founded
on the principle of absolute completeness and due recognition,
accord him? And is there information in this study useful to
the OED in subsequent editions, revisions, addenda, or supple-
ments?
An investigation of the OED's treatment of a representa-
tive sampling of William Barnes' Saxonisms may answer these
questions of linguistic and scholarly consequence. At the same
time it can lead to the solution of other vital inquiries:
1. What particular method or methods did William Barnes
find most useful for the creation of native English words?
2. What proportion of his recommended expressions are
created, converted, or restored?
3. What general lessons about language and vocabulary
are derived from such a study?
The investigation is complex. It can lead far afield, to re-
turn at times with knowledge gained. Preliminary to a more
extended survey of William Barnes' terminologies, the fuller
examination of one of his words will clarify the intended ap-
proach, the materials, the possible extensions, the frequent
puzzles, and the conclusions. That is a key word: bird-lore.
Is there such a word as bird-lore? The answer is certainly
I
68 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
yes. If appearance in print and long years of public use estab-
lish a word, bird-lore exists. It entered book print at least six-
ty years ago; William Barnes announced it in An Outline of
Speech-Craft in 1878, as a substitute for ornithology which was
simple, native, and natural. Everyone could understand it. It
was a compound word of two Anglo-Saxon components, direct-
ly translated from the learned ornithology.
These are statements that demand proof. Proof is avail-
able. Old English enjoyed the custom of such combining, pro-
liferating a word like lore (OE lar) endlessly. Hall's Anglo-
Saxon Dictionary22 cites larboc (learned books), larcraeft
(erudition), and half a dozen others. Bosworth and Toller's
Anglo-Saxon Dictionary substantiates the existence of many
such words, from lardon (instruction) to larhus (school).
Middle English, while not fecundating in this manner, retained
and wielded similar words. In Stratmann and Bradley's A Mid-
dle-English Dictionary are lar-faeder (teacher), lar-spell (ser-
mon), and the like. Among none of these words is bird4ore.
To create bird-lore, then, was to utilize both the ancient and
noble method of compounding and the traditional suffix of
lore.
But is 1878 the birth date of bird-lore? The OED pro-
vides a rather cavalier lead. Attention is directed to terms
such as "bird-gazer, bird-organ, bird-witted, bird-bolt." Bird-
lore, however, is named only in a dismissive parenthesis:
In the Gentleman s Magazine for June, 1830, p. 503, a correspond-
ent suggested that English compounds of lore should be substituted for
the names of sciences in -ology : e.g. birdlore for ornithology. . . . The
suggestion was never adopted, though some few words out of the long
list of those proposed are occasionally used. ... In German, several
compounds of the equivalet lehre are in regular use as names of sciences
or departments of study: e.g. sprachlehre (speech-lore) grammar.23
"The suggestion was never adopted." An index of periodical
literature refers to the contemporary Audubon Magazine, the
official name of which from 1899 through 1940 was Bird-Lore.
For two generations bird-lore was popularized widely twice a
month.
Search reverts to the Gentleman's Magazine. The article
of 1830 mentioned by the OED is signed 'Dilettante.' William
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 69
Barnes' daughter has recorded that under the name of Dilet-
tante "As early as 1830 he was publishing about language in
the Dorset County Chronicle." She adds that "In 1831 Wil-
liam Barnes first appears in connection with the Gentleman' s
Magazine."24' Could she not be one year late, and the Dilet-
tante of the Gentleman's Magazine in 1830 be the Dilettante
of the 1830 Chronicle?
In the article Dilettante provided more words than bird-
lore. The motive and the prose sound like the younger Barnes :
Good English words might be easily formed for the awkward and
irregular ones frequently borrowed ; and I hope these observations will
meet the eyes of some scholars who may be better able, and no less
willing than I am, to stop the contemptible system of Gall'icising, Latin-
izing and Hellenizing our language, now so extremely common that it
is likely to make it in a few years a medly understood critically only by
a few professors of the dead and living languages.25
Hesitantly Dilettante suggests a number of substitute
terms. Where the words do not agree with those Barnes surely
forwarded, the suffixes or the general tone does :
coup d'oeil, glance
protege, ward
aid de camp, an under general
beau monde, the fine world
jeu d'esprit, a sally of wit
belles lettres, fine learning
canaille, rabble
billet-doux, a love-note
grandiloquous, high-taking
royal, kingly
coup de grace, a master-stroke
typographer, printer
sang froid, cool blood, coolness
jeu de mots, pun
bagatelle, trifle
finesse, a will
precursor, a forerunner
connoisseur, an understander
escritoir, a writing chest
annual, yearly
lieutenant, steadholder
70 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
aviary, birdstead
menagerie, animal stead
rendezvous, meetingstead
asylum, safestead
locomotive, steadgoing
dislocate, unstead
place of amusement, gaystead
museum, lorestead
substitute, steadman
laboratory, workstead
reformatoty, mendstead
ornithology, birdlore
mythology, fablelore
osteology, bonelore
pathology, painlore
tactics, warlore
geology, earthlore
philology, wordlore
astronomy, starlore
conchology, shell-lore
optics, lightlore
royalty, kinghood
absenteeism, absenteehood
beggary, beggarhood.26
It is presumptive then that a 'Dilettante' who almost surely
was William Barnes created the word birdlore (later bird-lore)
in 1830 following the pattern of Saxon compounds and utiliz-
ing the favorite Saxon suffix of lore. It is certain that William
Barnes employed the word in 1878 and that in 1888 the OED
denied it genuine recognition and full acceptance despite the
principles basic to the Dictionary. The parenthesis which dis-
missed it may well have been Furnivall's; he was the most
active worker and sub-editor. It is certain too that after 1899
bird-lore was prominently displayed and seen through the me-
dium of "an illustrated bi-monthly magazine devoted to the
study and protection of birds and mammals."27
When the Supplement to the OED was issued in 1933, it
allowed the word to remain unheralded and practically unac-
knowledged. Contrary as it is to the fundamental precepts of
this Dictionary, this oversight requires rectification in the first
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 71
future emendation of the OED. Funk and Wagnall's Diction-
ary does not include the word. Webster's New International
Dictionary finds room for it, though without mention of its
origin or inventor.28
One question yet asks satisfaction. As a dialectician did
Barnes know the word from provincial speech; was it, rather
than a creation, simply the popularization of a localism?
Joseph Wright's Dialect Dictionary offers no notice of bird-
lore, and the presumption remains that Barnes coined it fresh,
and to this day remains its heretofore unhonored inventor. The
word is a good one, an advantageous one; it has been accepted
and used. It is no mean thing to create a living word.
Final conclusions about William Barnes' vocabulary can-
not be unassailably set. To calculate the proportion of words
which he invented freshly, for example, is to deal in risks.
Many of his terms can fit two or more categories. For example :
halesome was an established dialect expression, Wright at-
tests: the OED lists it in occasional standard use until 1 8 13 ;
it was also known, as halsum, in Middle English. It appears in
Barnes' Speech-Craft in 1878. Did Barnes modernize the ME
word, or seek to popularize the dialect word, or did he know
the word from standard speech? Had he heard gleecraft,
used in Early England of 1869, in rare contemporary English,
did he adapt it from ME, or resuscitate it from OE? Ques-
tions like these cannot be answered with certainty; a weighing
of possibilities, a conjecture of probabilities alone are permis-
sible. Nonetheless it is allowable to compute some rough esti-
mates of Barnes' methods, based upon a thorough inquiry into
representative terms employed by Barnes. A meticulous in-
spection of some two hundred such words shows that they
derive in most part from five sources :
1. Direct revivals of Old English and Middle English
terms, often modernized by slight alterations. Into this cate-
gory seem to fit words like year day (anniversary), waterlode
(aqueduct), and leaf en (foliate).
2. Pure neologisms, founded generally upon one of two
Anglo-Saxon methods: compounds, and affixes. In this class
72 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
seem to fit words like bird-lore (ornithology) , folkdom (democ-
racy), and fallsome (disposed to fall).
3. Dialect words, which Barnes sought to acclimate in
standard speech. Included in the words of this category are
bode sale (auction) and rede-ship (good advice).
4. Standard English words, which Barnes sponsored and
promoted for more popular and accepted use, particularly as
replacements for their latinic equivalents. Some of these he
may have created independently on the basis of OE principles;
a great number he seems to have revived from obsolescence.
Among this type are fairhood (beauty) , book-lore (literature),
and forewit (caution).
5. Added meanings to recognized words, which thus can
satisfy the need now filled by classic terminology. Such a word
was glee craft (music).
In approximate percentages, based on the reasonable as-
sumption that the tested words represent Barnes' main types
of recommended vocabulary, it appears that Barnes sought or
found his terminologies in this order :
43 % : pure neologisms, based on Saxon principles.
30% : restoration and support of obsolescent or neglected
standard terms.
14% : dialect words advanced for general use.
7%: OE and ME terms, restored and modernized in
spelling.
6% : added meanings to standard native words.
One certain judgment can be made, moreover, and it is
unquestionable. Whatever the source of William Barnes' rec-
ommended terminologies, the one dictionary planned to in-
clude all "new and tentative" words of the English language
has notably ignored his work. Of the seventy or more unques-
tionable neologisms found in the selected list of Barnesian
terms investigated, the OED credits Barnes with but one :
bendsome. Even that is quoted from a magazine article pub-
lished seven years after the first book appearance of the word.
Not only that. Though Barnes often is the only man to use a
forgotten word in his generation, his name is almost invariably
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 73
ignored by the OED. Out of more than fifty such expressions
he is cited but twice : speech-craft and suchness.
Befoul is typical. Barnes used it in 1869. The OED last
ascribes it to 1844, though it has tracked the word from 1320.
Included with the word leaf en in the OED is but one citation,
for 1746; Barnes' employment of the word in 1878 is disre-
garded. Often the OED traces a term closely through hun-
dreds of years; yet when it is again written after a lapse of
many generations, by Barnes, the usage is ignored. So with
fairhood, trailed from 1250 to 1587, with Barnes' encour-
agement of the word in 1869 unmentioned. The summation
can be put bluntly. Barnes has been slurred over by the OED,
his neologisms, his restorations, his support of once-popular
terms in the main unrecognized and uncredited. This violates
the chief premise of the Dictionary.
Is there explication for this? The OED supplies a mis-
leading suggestion. The only works by Barnes specified as in-
spected for the OED are his Glossary of the Dorset dialect
and his Poems.30 The fair conclusion from this would be that
his philological books were strangely neglected in the making
of the great philological Dictionary. Yet contradicting these
few titles, Speech-Craft is quoted within the dictionary itself.
From that book the OED took speech-craft; whereas on quick-
en, soaksome, somely, waterlode, and others from that same
volume are nevertheless unrecognized by the OED. . With
Speech-Craft the only specific general linguistic book by Barnes
located through this study within the OED, it seems probable
indeed that the Dictionary slighted at least six other compara-
tively well-reviewed and well-known linguistic productions by
William Barnes. That is odd. Even terms from the Grammar
and Glossary which the Philological Society had published are
disregarded by the Oxford English Dictionary, which the Philo-
logical Society founded and forwarded.
The matter is dark. The explanation, however, is possible,
though hazardous. The directive and editing influence of the
OED during a formative generation was F. J. Furnivall. As
has been seen, he spurned Barnes' neologisms when they were
presented in the course of one book and two papers before the
74 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Philological Society. Furnivall saw little reason for the words.
Condemning them once, he was perhaps convinced that he had
condemned them forever. He judged the words unfit or un-
necessary; therefore he judged them dead, non-existent. Doing
so, he may have ruled out the vast part of Barnes' achievement.
His ukase and prohibition, it may be, compromise the OED's
professed intention and deepest principle : all-inclusiveness.
That Barnes is neglected even in his support of fairly standard
words may derive from the same prejudice. The powerful ed-
itor of the OED during its incipience had dismissed Barnes'
efforts, and the rule was maintained except for a few breaches.
This, of course, remains conjectural. No sounder reason, how-
ever, seems available for the treatment visited upon Barnes by
the one work designed to incorporate efforts such as his, the
OED, despite his long years of achievement and publication.
Henry Bradley, who knew Furnivall intimately, said pene-
tratingly: "His harsh judgments were not always just."31
Rejecting Barnes as an enthusiast and thus tending to destroy
a lifetime of production and thought, Furnivall may have ex-
ercised this harsh and unjust judgment, to the detriment of the
great dictionary with which he was so long and so powerfully
associated.
Chapter V
THE OVER-ALL VIEW
The lot of the reformer has never been easy. He is as-
sailed on two or more sides. There are those who declare his
recommendations unnecessary, and those who declare them un-
wise. In language reform it is much the same. William Barnes
was a reformer, in true sense a radical. For over sixty years
he contested the standard English of his day, convinced that it
was an evil in itself and that it encouraged an even more serious
evil.
It was evil in itself, he said, because it was unintelligible to
the great mass of its hearers and readers. It humiliated and
handicapped them. At the level where understanding was most
essential — the educational years — that language was most un-
intelligible. Learned, latinic English became, in his expression,
"Englandish," a language foreign to its people. It crippled
their cultural advance, not because of the length or look of
the words, but because they had no earth-bound, native paral-
lel to identify them. Classical scholars have been forced to
admit :
There is no gainsaying, however, that the vocabulary of science and
medicine is the language of Greece and Rome.
Lack of knowledge of Greek and Latin words has hampered the
mastery of the scientific terminology, and, tragically, has actually im-
peded the rate of progress in scientific training.1
As a man of thirty Barnes wrote of latinized English :
It renders our language less simple, less perspicuous, less pure, less
regular, and fit only for learned people to converse with each other in,
being no longer one in which the more learned can easily teach the less
so : this assertion will be admitted by those who know that half a country
congregation understand but half the sermon, and youth but a quarter
of what they read. . . .
It causes great toil and obstructions to the teacher of youth, and keeps
the pupil learning words, when he should be learning facts. Hence the
dry expositions, glossaries, &c. that tire children before they have learnt
anything of use.2
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76 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
Moreover the incessant borrowing of foreign words in-
duced an evil greater than itself, Barnes pointed out; it injured
English at its heart. No language more than English had been
and still remained capable of deft, luxuriant and advantageous
growth out of its own character and quality. Borrowing a vo-
cabulary was dangerous to this pertinent and personal attribute
of English itself: it would atrophy or even destroy English's
innate genius for self-expansion. He denoted the vast richness
of affixes and the fertile compounds inherent in the native
speech. Those who so readily borrowed foreign terms under-
estimated^— or did not realize — the gift possessed by Saxon
English itself:
That we have not equivalents for many terms we borrow, I will
allow; but to say that we could not make such by composition, would
be a different thing. Where the marching intellect in England seeks
new words from other languages, the Germans compound them with
the greatest ease and accuracy from their own; and whatever they can
do with their language, we can do with ours. . . .
There is no need of borrowing, because we can make words to any
extent by compounding those we have already.3
Unlike many men, Barnes not only argued his case, he put
it into execution. He composed great numbers of terms on
Saxon principles, to prove both the case of the process and the
suitability and pleasantness of the neologisms. He searched
early English writing for terms worthy of restoration. Side by
side with less comprehensible latinic English words he placed
native counterparts. He illustrated the procedure for a native
English and the result. More than that. In two full volumes
he sought to demonstrate that what standard Englandish made
"deep only because it was dark," a reborn Saxon speech could
simplify and illuminate. While all his linguistic works portray
some aspects of his endeavor and achievement, the key docu-
ments are Early England and the Saxon English, An Outline of
English Speech-Craft, and An Outline of Rede-Craft.
The "purity" of the English vocabulary has been debated
from the days of the English Renaissance to these days of
Basic English. Before any preachment can have genuine effect,
someone must prove that an English cleansed of foreign terms,
and specifically, of latinic components is practical, usable, and
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 11
fluent. It is Barnes' glory that he set out to do just that. An-
alyzing the defects of the standard speech with reiterated thor-
oughness, restoring, reviving, supporting obsolete, obsolescent,
or neglected Saxon terms, and coining a host of native termi-
nologies, William Barnes hypostasized what his predecessors
but devoutly urged. Thereby he became the culmination and
climax of centuries of purist reform.
Idle frivolity was not the goad. As teacher and as preacher
Barnes saw first hand, undebatably, that the land folk were
prevented an education by an arcane vocabulary from Latin
and Greek. Native words, and new words expanded from self-
explaining native terms, swept away this blinding barrier.
Moreover Barnes was a scholar; the deeper versed he became
in linguistic history, the more he realized that the imported
words had not been necessary. They had stolen in or forced
their way in; they had merely supplanted suitable native terms.
By his knowledge of Old English and of the wealth of dialect,
Barnes was convinced that the forgotten native stocks were
valuable. He regretted that the English world should, from
ignorance, disdain its own natural treasures. Knowing many
foreign languages, he saw that English had been more neglect-
ful and callous than most, whose clarity and naturalness en-
couraged the education of the young and dissolved class preju-
dices.
This study has sought to show that Barnes' reasons for
opposition to standard English were many, his motives honor-
able, his research extensive, and his production notable. Many
of the terms he introduced or restored are strong, pleasing,
and desirable. In return, he has met opposition.
Most striking and most puzzling is the attitude of the
Oxford English Dictionary . This famous dictionary is dedi-
cated to two chief doctrines: incorporation of all words in the
literature of English, with no slurring of the new, tentative,
obsolescent, or archaic; and due credit to all men who have
employed a word significantly or have presented it anew to
their generation. No man more than William Barnes merits
acknowledgment on both counts by the OED. He is virtually
ignored by it. Not i per cent of his neologisms are listed by that
work; not 2 per cent of his neologisms, revivals, and note-
78 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
worthy support of recognized terms all together are regarded
by the OED.
This neglect is most surprising in that it envelops even such
attractive and valuable Barnesian neologisms as bird-lore (or-
nithology), birdstow (aviary), Englandish (book English),
folkdom (democracy), fore-note (preface), hairbane (depila-
tory), heedsome (attentive), lawcraft (jurisprudence), link-
word (conjunction), loremote (meeting of learned societies),
lore-words (terms of science), moonmad (lunatic), rail-end
(terminus), outstep (remote), rede-craft (logic), soaksome
(bibulous), somely (plural), sound-lore (acoustics), speech-
lore (philology), statespell (embassy), sundersome (sepa-
rable), sunprint (photograph), tastecraft (aesthetics), tree-
stow (arboretum), and wortlore (botany). Other men, more-
over have been awarded credit equally proper to Barnes. Like
Tennyson he wrote of rathe. Tennyson is credited, but not
Barnes.
Barnes' remarkable accomplishment, then, has been weirdly
neglected. Later editions of the OED, it seems clear, must re-
consider the fame and achievements of William Barnes.
It is to be expected that, along with all men who contest the
status quo, William Barnes has been assaulted on many fronts.
It would be well here to inspect briefly the kinds of argument
presented not alone against him but against any movement for
the reinvigoration of native, Saxon English. Perhaps, as well,
the arguments used by Barnes in defense of his doctrine can be
considered.
If the unlearned do not understand latinic English, would
it not be better to raise the level of education so that all men
would understand it, rather than to criticise and amend the
standard terminology? In short, education, not alteration.
This proposal seeks to sidestep the difficulty in educating men
by means of a recondite vocabulary. The proposal pleads: use
the difficult to teach the difficult, so that one generation will
understand the difficulty that a revised system would vitiate.
Meanwhile a new generation grows up to inherit the same dif-
ficulty. But Barnes was concerned too with the deeper implica-
tion. He did not ask merely for a simplified English; he de-
sired English to return to its own genius for growth, its own
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 79
methods of generous enlargement. He witnessed and mourned
the atrophy of the Saxon English talent for self-expansion.
Greater emphasis on education, to teach the citizenry the book
English of its day, bypasses the more meaningful desirability:
to revivify English as a self-compounding, self-explaining
language.
English is satisfying and beautiful as it is; do not all at-
tempts at change blunt before this truth? Naturally an argu-
ment on this line is an argument from the status quo. It spurns
the possibility which Barnes constantly stressed, that a reinvig-
orated Saxon English may be equally or more beautiful and
satisfying, as well as possessed of wide intelligibility. If English
utilized its immanent virtues, it could as wTell be debated, with
the due euphony of time it might be a language superior for po-
etry and communication to the speech of today. Present English
is pleasing indeed. Does that forfend the prospect of a pleasing
speech under a different auspice? The younger Barnes wrote :
The apology commonly made for the use of exotic expression, is,
either that they are more expressive than our own, or that we have none
that will give their meaning; both of which assertions are as idle as they
are scandalous to the English nation. If they are more expressive than
our own, we must allow that their inventors are men of a better wit
than ourselves, but I cannot easily believe that the word porte-fenille
expresses (to an Englishman) the use of the thing better than the word
paper-case would ... or that chef-d'oeuvre is more expressive than
masterpiece; naivete, than artlessness. . . .4
A sobering realization is that a certain antagonism to a new
credo of language is plain stand-pattism. When Swift remon-
strated against mob he did not think that a later generation
would consider his enmity absurd. Once bird-lore y say, replaced
"ornithology," its naturalness and ease could render its Greek
original fantastic, and contemporary disapproval of Saxon
terms of the sort would seem properly absurd to a later gene-
ration.
The Latin and Greek word is now established as an integral
part of the language; why reject it? So too, as Barnes knew
and revealed, the Saxon word had been established, only to be
ejected by the exotic term. If an Anglo-Saxon equivalent is
available, he said, if it is self-explaining, surely it is the better
80 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
word. Handbook was long replaced by the French "manual"
and the Greek "enchiridion." The true view, Barnes believed,
is that a precisely equivalent native term has generally been
sacrificed to the intruder. The usurper is established today; a
better and native word was established yesterday and could be
re-established tomorrow. Why should the "established" manual
be retained, he wondered, when the historical, understandable
handbook was for long suppressed by it, and could now resume
its proper stature?
English as it now is admittedly triumphs over the languages
of the world; to change its whole course is to tamper danger-
ously with it. Those who argue along this line are normally
men like Logan Pearsall Smith, scholars of classical back-
ground, men deeply acquainted with Latin and Greek. They
view language from that eyrie. In truth, many of them are
not cognizant of and sympathetic to the problems of the un-
schooled. The voice of a Barnes comes dim to their ears. Their
background rarely included Old English, Middle English, and
the Teutonic languages. Men of the latter culture are not
eager to share the convictions of classical scholars. Like Otto
Jespersen, students of Northern training tend to the views of
William Barnes.
Supporting Northern scholarship in this is the endeavor
of English dialecticians, those men who know fundamental
English best at its once bountiful springs of the local hearth.
They support with Barnes the usefulness, subtlety, and supple-
ness of the native English which dwells on in exile.
Nor should English be judged and misjudged by invidious
comparison. To criticise a Saxon English on the basis of Ger-
man is unwise. Under the stimulus of history, whim, and basic
quality, Saxon English would have gone its individual course.
Just as the English fire is not the German feuer, or far its fern,
so English would have flowered according to English and not
German ways.
English today is beautiful, flexible, indeed. English rein-
spired by its Saxon richness, Barnes felt, could be even better;
so Jespersen felt, from the wide sources of his Northern schol-
arship. Synonymity under present standards is profuse. Jes-
persen believes with Barnes that it would increase under an
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 81
Anglo-Saxon aegis. Once again status quo argues for and from
status quo. How can it be doubted, Barnes inquired, that easy
synonyms would have evolved in the course of generations from
an Anglo-Saxon speech? He proved the ability alive.
Certainly the twentieth century is witnessing an interesting,
relevant phenomenon. A modern trend toward simplicity of
language has promoted many obsolescent Saxon terminologies.
In their conversation and teaching, most learned men now pre-
fer a term like "wordiness" to "garrulity." A magazine is
titled Bird-Lore, and the public appreciates and esteems the
word. When a good Saxon expression is properly revived or
emphasized, it has often been accepted. Hemingway's quotation
of Donne popularized the word "tolled" far beyond a week's
fame. Once a self-explanatory term from the older stock of
English is wisely introduced, indeed, many hearers are often
cosily pleased with the hominess, strength, and rock-ribbed
quality of the word.
Snobbery, it must be frankly admitted, tinges a great deal
of the exasperated support bestowed upon English latinism.
What Thorstein Veblen analyzed with surgical dispassionate-
ness cannot be altogether disputed. Often useful in the present
state of the language, these latinisms nonetheless derive more
than a modicum of adherence from pridefulness in their use.
Others cannot pronounce them or do not understand them;
those who can and do feel an unconscionable pride. Of this
allure, Barnes said, without rancor:
Since the use of language is to communicate our thought to each
other, I think that the language which is the most perspicuous (the most
easily understood), and the most simple (the most easily learned) is the
best. But if we use ten thousand borrowed words, of which an English-
man has to learn the meaning and sound, instead of as many English ones,
of which he knows the meaning and sound without seeking them, we
make our language less perspicuous and simple, and consequently less
excellent. It may be said that the borrowed words are understood by
well-educated people, which I will allow to some extent ; but they are
critically understood by those only who know the languages from which
they are borrowed ; and it is no commendation to the English tongue, to
say that one must learn three or four others to understand it.5
It is true that a certain part of William Barnes' doctrine
82 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
is repetitious or trivial, that a certain part of his Saxon vocab-
ulary is unhandy. A share of it deserves little regard. The
greater lesson and import of his works and words, however, is
of serious significance. The program they incorporate, the
philosophy they announce, and the achievement they often rep-
resent are of interest and value to all those who think dearly
and deeply of the English tongue.
Education and scholarship spread. Despite the horrors and
terrors of their warring world, men continue to study and
search. As they ransack their usable past they will unearth
many goods. In his field and his study William Barnes revital-
ized a theory of language which he believed sound, practical,
and desirable. Out of the sympathy of his heart and the con-
viction of his mind he presented the world with a number of
revivified or devised terminologies which might serve in them-
selves, and as a model for others, to clarify education, help
dissolve class snobbery, and reinvigorate the native genius of
the English language. His work has been largely disregarded.
His philological studies have been mostly ignored. With time,
nevertheless, with continued research, the resources contained
in Saxon English will be further revealed to the English-
speaking world. The treasure will be great.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 Llewelyn Powys, Earth Memories (New York: Norton & Company, 1938),
p. 184.
2 C. W. Moulton, editor, The Library of Literary Criticism (Buffalo:
Moulton Publishing Co., 1904), VII, 587. The encomium is from Charles
Sayle's The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, 1894.
3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, "William Barnes," (London: Encyclopaedia Bri-
tannica Co., 1936), 14th edition, III, 123. This article is unsigned.
4 S. J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, British Authors of the Nineteenth
Century (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1936), p. 37.
5 Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1931), p. 155.
6 Lionel Johnson, The Art of Thomas Hardy (London: Mathews & Lane,
1894), p. lviii.
7 John Drinkwater, editor, Twenty Poems in Common English by William
Barnes (New York: Duffield & Co., 1925), p. 7.
8 Cf. the note in the Charlotte Observer, 14 March, 1941: "Germans who
play lawn tennis and follow the decree to use German instead of English terms
call a mixed double a 'gemischtes dopple' and a lob a 'hichball.' " This was
not merely a Nazi decree; such Germanizing is a basic tenet of the language.
9 Lancelot Hogben, Author in Transit (New York: Norton & Company,
1940), p. 218, comments with distaste on "pig-headed nationalism, like the lan-
guage policy of replacing all international terms by words based on old Norse
roots in Iceland, where a telescope is a sight-pipa." But is that such a ridicu-
lous substitution?
CHAPTER I
1 Thomas Hardy, editor, Select Poems of William Barnes (London: Henry
Frowde, 1908), p. iii.
2 Logan Pearsall Smith, Milton and His Modern Critics (Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1941), pp. 73"74-
3 William Barnes, Early England and the Saxon-English (London: J. R.
Smith, 1869), pp. 106-107.
4 William Barnes, A Philological Grammar (London: J. R. Smith, 1854),
p. 258. . , .
5 William Barnes, An Outline of English Speech-Craft (London: C. Kegan
Paul & Co., 1878), p. iv.
6 Lucy Baxter, The Life of William Barnes (London: Macmillan & Co.,
1887), p. 206. Mrs. Baxter, who wrote on art under the name of Leader Scott,
was Barnes' daughter.
7 William Barnes, A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with the
History, Outspreading, and Bearings of South-W ' estcrn English (Berlin: A.
Asher & Co., 1863), p. 9.
8 "The success of the first few experiments" in Dorset verse "was enough
to convince him that the simpler Saxon English was not only more forcible, but
also more poetical than Latinized speech." Baxter, op. cit., p. 85.
CHAPTER II
1 William Barnes, Se Gefylsta {The Helper): An Anglo-Saxon Delectus.
Serving as a First Class-Book of the Language (London: J. R. Smith, 1849).
2 Ibid., p. iii.
3 Ibid., p. 10.
4 Ibid., p. 60.
5 Ibid., p. 57 ff.
83
84 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
6 William Barnes, A Philological Grammar, Grounded upon English, and
Formed from a Comparison of More than Sixty Languages, Being an Intro-
duction to the Science of Grammar, and a Help to Grammars of all Languages,
Especially English, Latin, and Greek (London: J. R. Smith, 1854).
7 Ibid., pp. vii-viii.
8 Ibid., p. 258.
9 Loc. cit.
10 Ibid., p. vi.
11 Ibid., p. 68.
12 Ibid., p. 70.
13 Loc. cit.
14 Ibid., pp. 258-259.
15 Ibid., p. 68 et passim.
16 Baxter, op. cit., p. 137.
17 William Barnes, Tiw; or a View of the Roots and Stems of the English
as a Teutonic Tongue (London: J. R. Smith, 1862). "I call my view of Teu-
tonic roots TIW, as the name of the god from which the Teutonic race seem to
have taken their name"; footnote, p. v.
18 Ibid., p. v.
19 Ibid., p. xvii. Barnes recommends that the sound "i" be supplied for the
asterisk, "since it gives to the root that form which is most usual in the Teutonic
tongues."
20 Ibid., appendix, p. 5.
21 Baxter, op. cit., p. 189.
22 Ibid., p. 191.
23 Loc. cit.
24 Sidney Lee, editor, Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1901), Supplement I, 132.
25 Tiiv, op. cit., p. vi.
2<5 Ibid., p. vi ff.
27 Ibid., p. 69 ff. For the asterisk, vide footnote No. 19 ante. The n. and s.tv.
represent words of north or southwest English dialects.
28 Ibid., p. xix.
29 Ibid., p. xxi.
30 Ibid., pp. xvii-xviii.
31 Ibid., p. 3 et passim.
32 William Barnes, A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with
the History, Outspreading, and Bearings of South-Western English (Berlin: A.
Asher & Co., 1863).
33 Baxter, op. cit., p. 221.
34 Thomas Hardy, editor, Select Poems of William Barnes (London: Henry
Frowde, 1908), p. viii.
35 A Grammar and Glossary, op. cit., p. 1.
36 Ibid., p. 24.
37 Ibid., p. 28.
38 Ibid., p. 9.
39 Joseph Wright, editor, The English Dialect Dictionary (London: Henry
Frowde, 1898) I, vii.
40 Thomas Wright, editor, Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English
(London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), pp. v-vi.
41 A Grammar and Glossary, op. cit., p. 43 et passim.
42 A later section will develop this oddity more fully.
43 William Barnes, Early England and the Saxon-English, with some notes
on the Father-Stock of the Saxon-English, the Friesians (London: J. R. Smith,
1869).
44 Ibid., unpaged.
45 Ibid., pp. 101-102.
46 Ibid., p. 91.
47 Ibid., p. 93.
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST
85
48 Loc. ch.
49 Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary
of the English Lan-
guage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935; original edition,
1879), p. XX.
50 Early England, op. cit., p. 91.
51 Ibid., p. 103 f.
52 Ibid., p. 106.
53 Ibid., pp. 106-107.
54:Ibid., p. 107.
55 Ibid., pp. 105-106.
56 Ibid., p. 176.
57 Ibid., p. 114.
58 Ibid., p. 96.
59 Ibid., p. 9.
'
60 Ibid., p. 19.
61 Ibid., p. 157.
62 Ibid., p. 159.
63 Ibid., p. 165.
<^Ibid., p. 28.
65 Ibid., pp. 104-105.
66 Ibid., p. 124 ff. Freshman students at the University of North Carolina
confronted with a Coker Treestow would have more inkling of its nature than
now they gain from Coker Arboretum. Certainly beestow and birdstow would
forever end the confusion now only too prevalent between apiary and aviary.
67 Ibid., pp. 102-103. Barnes was apparently unaware that "plunge" and
"firm" are not Anglo-Saxon in origin.
68 William Barnes, An Outline of English Speech-Craft (London: C.
Kegan Paul & Co., 1878).
69 James A. H. Murray, et al., editors, Ne<w English Dictionary (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1888-1933), "Speech-craft."
70 Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada, Europeo- Americana (Barcelona: Hijos
de L. Espasa, undated), VII, 848. This seems borrowed almost literally from
the next reference.
71 New International Encyclopedia (New York: Dodd Mead & Co., 2nd
edition, 1930), II, 693.
72 Pamela Tennant, "William Barnes," The Academy (January-June, 1907),
LXXII, 511.
73 Speech-Craft, op. cit., p. iii.
74 Ibid., p. v.
75 Ibid., p. 86.
76 Baxter, op. cit., p. 274.
77 Speech-Craft, op. cit., p. iv.
78 Loc. cit.
79 Ibid., pp. vii-viii.
80 Ibid., pp. 86-87.
81 Ibid., p. 43.
82 Ibid.,
P"
88.
83 Loc.
cit.
84 Ibid.,
P-
36.
85 Ibid.,
P-
88.
S6 Ibid.,
P-
43-
87 Ibid.,
P-
v.
88 lbid.t
P-
?.?
89 Ibid.,
P-
iii.
99 Ibid.,
P-
3-
9* Ibid.,
P-
8.
92 Ibid.,
P-
iii
Some of these may be the very words a goodly number of
harassed English teachers are seeking.
93 A Philological Grammar, op. cit., p. 1.
94 Speech-Craft, op. cit., p. 1.
86 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PUBLICATIONS
95 Ibid., p. 47 et passim.
96 Ibid., p. 44.
97 Baxter, op. cit., p. 275.
98 Tennant, loc. cit.
99 Speech-Craft, op. cit., p. 89.
CHAPTER III
1 William Barnes, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (London: C.
Kegan Paul & Co., 1879), p. 459.
2 Ibid., p. 467.
3 William Barnes, An Outline of Rede-Craft {Logic) with English Word-
ing (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880).
4 Ibid., p. v.
5 Ibid., pp. v-vi.
6 Ibid., p. vii.
7 Ibid., pp. vii-viii.
8 Ibid., p. 48 ff.
9 Baxter, op. cit., p. 291.
10 Rede-Craft, op. cit., p. 1.
11 Ibid., pp. 44-45-
12 Ibid., p. 27.
13 Ibid., p. 22.
14 Ibid., p. 28
15 Ibid., pp. 55-56.
16 Ibid., p. 39.
17 James M. Baldwin, editor, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (New
York: Macmiilan Co., 1902), II, 628.
18 Ibid., 629 ff.
19 Rede-Craft, op. cit., p. v. et passim. The words "matters" and "straitened"
are not of Anglo-Saxon provenance.
CHAPTER IV
1 Isadore G. Mudge, Guide to Reference Books (Chicago: American Li-
brary Association, 1936), p. 55.
2 James A. H. Murray, et al., editors, A New English Dictionary on His-
torical Principles ; founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological
Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888-1933). Twelve volumes plus Supple-
ment. Volume I was issued in 1888; Volume X, Part II, in 1928, and the
Supplement in 1933. Throughout this paper it is termed the OED, as the most
convenient and popular symbol. All references to it here include the 1933
Supplement.
3 Harrison R. Steeves, Learned Societies and English Literary Scholarship
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1913), p. 148.
4 Loc. cit.
5 Loc. cit.
6 William Barnes, A Philological Grammar Grounded upon English (Lon-
don: J. R. Smith, 1854), p. 208.
7 William Barnes, Early England and the Saxon English (London: J. R.
Smith, 1869), p. 93.
8 Quoted by Lucy Baxter, The Life of William Barnes (London: Macmiilan
& Co., 1887), p. 221.
9 OED, op. cit., Supplement, viii.
10 Baxter, op. cit., p. 222.
11 Ibid., p. 221.
12 "Frederick James Furnivall," Encyclopaedia Britannica (New York: En-
cyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 14th edition, 1936), IX, 951. No authorship is
supplied for this article.
13 Frederick J. Furnivall, A Volume of Personal Record (London: Henry
WILLIAM BARNES, LINGUIST 87
Frowde, 1911), pp. xlii-xliii. This is a memorial volume to Furnivall, contain-
ing laudatory articles by the great and near great of his time, and even by the
waitress who served him his daily tea at an Oxford Street ABC lunch-room. The
statement here is by John Munro.
14 Steeves, loc. cit. The italics are supplied. "Puristic" in this quotation ob-
viously means "moral" or "of high literary tone" and is not to be confused with
the normal academic definition: "restricted to native words."
15 OED, loc. cit.
16 Ibid., xv. The underlining is in the original instructions. It is notable in
what follows, as is the whole of this triad of directives. They sound almost spe-
cifically descriptive of words like Barnes' new Saxon vocabulary.
17 Elizabeth Mary Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (London: Oxford
University Press, 1932), II, 349-350. The statement is quoted from Skeat's A
Student's Pastime.
18 Furnivall, op. cit., pp. 134-135.
19 OED, op. cit., Supplement, xxi.
20 Ibid., xii.
21 Ibid., xxi ff.
2- Vide infra for complete information on this title and the scholarly works
that follow. Because of mechanical difficulties, most diacritical marks are left
off OE and ME words in this paper, where their import is not vital.
23 OED, op. cit., VI, 447.
24 Baxter, op. cit., pp. 30-31.
25 Sylvanus Urban, The Gentleman's Magazine (London: J. B. Nichols
& Sons, 1830), p. 503. This is a semi-annual bound volume of the Magazine.
26 Loc. cit.
27 The American editor, F. M. Chapman, who perhaps selected Bird-Lore
for the title, is not mentioned in the Dictionary of American Biography.
28 Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language
(Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1942), p. 272.
29 OED, op. cit., Supplement, Bibliography, 6.
30 Furnivall, op. cit., p. 9.
CHAPTER V
1 Charles B. Brown, The Contribution of Greek to English (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1942), p. vii. From the Foreword by John Pomfret.
2 Sylvanus Urban, The Gentleman's Magazine (London: J. B. Nichols &
Sons, 1830), p. 502. The authorship of the quoted article was analyzed in
Chapter IV.
3 Loc. cit.
4 Loc. cit.
5 Ibid., p. 501.
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